For Love or Money Page 4

  But the security of this too had begun to fade. Perhaps it had all started with the realisation that Steven and he had always seen few people, that other parents were different. During the holidays he had been looking at some books in the dusty bookcase in the hall. He’d wondered how they’d got there, having seen them for as long as he could remember. Things didn’t just start after all, they were started. Somebody bought the books years ago and then, having discarded them, pushed them into this dusty communal grave. George had been wrong when he told him that things just happened. It wasn’t true. We make them happen. The pile of flies in the dust-sheeted guest-room at Trelawn hadn’t always been there. They could be taken away tomorrow. Like the rabbits too—one moment alive, the next dead. That moment when Steven had gone on hitting the rabbit’s head had decided him. George was wrong, George was responsible with his mother for everything that he now saw. His large brown eyes filled with tears; adolescence was certainly extremely tiresome.

  Later that evening he wrote his mother the sort of letter that she expected. Why should anything be wrong? What was there in particular for him to talk to her about? School affairs probably bored her. George had always told David that a good boy who did the right things and did his work would be all right in the end.

  Andrew Matthews, the new house tutor, was sitting in the bar of the ‘Fox and Grapes’ in the village of Edgecombe, half a mile from the school. He was alone. Since he had arrived at the school he had made no friends among his colleagues, only once having entered the common room. So far his teaching duties had not extended to private tuition in the house but apparently he was to give extra classes in classics to the brighter boys of all ages in the house, six in number.

  Matthews sipped his brandy appreciatively, swilling each mouthful slowly round his tongue before swallowing it. Although it was out of his teaching syllabus, he had been exploring some medieval French Romances as night-time reading. The ‘epic’ love of Yvain and his fellow knight, Gawain, he found especially diverting. Chrétien was nevertheless a little harsh. Who on earth wouldn’t have gone to a tournament with his boy-friend if asked, especially if the alternative was being on time for a date with a girl? And who, once there and enjoying all the fun, could possibly have remembered his previous engagement? He ran a long-fingered hand through his smooth black hair, as he started to read of Yvain’s punishment for not turning up as he had promised:

  Lors li monta uns torbeillous

  El chief si granz, que il forsane,

  Lors se descire …

  he clicked his tongue disapprovingly as he read on with occasional help from the glossary. Poor old Yvain, most unfair. His dark eyes flicked mechanically from line to line as he swiftly devoured the pages.

  He wasn’t ambitious; he’d only wanted a teaching job for a couple of years and had been genuinely surprised when his application for the Edgecombe job had led to an interview and final acceptance. He had seen that Crofts was weak and faded at their first meeting. Really the job should prove amusing. Besides, as he had once read in the teacher’s manual, ‘What is needed above all to be a successful teacher is a genuine love of boys’. So conventional, he sighed to himself, the last fling of a twenty-five-year-old adolescent in this cruelly adult world. But the conventional aspects were what appealed to him most in the dealings of knight with knight in the Romances.

  He looked up from his book over to where a group of local men were playing darts. The adult male is not an animal I admire, he reflected, stroking the base of his now empty glass; but at public schools there were very definitely those who made up in abundance for the shortcomings of these louts. The more genteel pursuits of a less barbarous age drew his eyes back to his book.

  What had Henry James seen fit to call Gilbert Osmond? ‘A sterile dilettante.’ Ah well, there are worse callings in life, far worse, he thought. In a quarter of an hour he had reached the passage where Yvain received the healing ointment.

  *

  Three days later David was sitting in his study, which he shared with two other boys. He was one of the most junior boys to be in a study, Crofts having singled him out for his undeniable aptitude in classics. Most of the junior boys lived communally in a large room known as the ‘Hall’. David was sitting in a warm arm-chair looking out of the window over a vista of trees towards the playing-fields. Group of boys in football shirts and different-coloured singlets were wending their way in groups back towards their houses. Behind David, in front of the gas fire, one of his room mates, Chadwick, was making toast using a ruler with an ingenious wire attachment on the end. His mother had just sent three pots of home-made lemon curd. David wondered without much hope whether he was going to be offered some. He had, after all, parted with several tins of sardines during the past week. The grease was still evident on the fender. Chadwick started to hum tunelessly.

  ‘Have you seen the new tutor?’ Chadwick asked as he pronged another piece of bread.

  ‘Isn’t he the one with the sharp nose and scrawny-looking neck?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him. That’s why I asked you, in case you hadn’t guessed.’

  ‘I’m almost sure it is.’ David tried to think of something conciliatory. It was getting dangerously near the time for spreading butter and jam on the newly made toast. ‘Crofts has bought a new suit,’ announced Chadwick suddenly.

  ‘Not another brown one?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Some people never learn.’

  Chadwick had been sent to the headmaster for continually chanting, ‘Brown suit, brown suit’, when he found himself within earshot of the housemaster and out of his line of vision. The headmaster had let him off, not having seen any Freudian undertones in the two words.

  Slowly Chadwick started to gnaw his way through the three bits of toast. David went over to the gramophone and put on some Chopin waltzes.

  ‘Do we have to have that muck?’ Chadwick spluttered through half-masticated toast and lemon curd.

  ‘Yes.’

  Chadwick accepted this and started reading the evening greyhound results. He had a friend in the village who placed bets for him.

  ‘I wonder if anybody has ever considered whether Aeneas was a homosexual‚’ David said thoughtfully as he opened his Vergil.

  ‘They all were.’

  Chadwick had a knack of closing conversations just when they were starting. Not even homosexuality, a topic which rarely failed with Chadwick, could make him more friendly. At least in Hall there had been people to talk to.

  In two hours’ time, David was due to go to Mr. Matthews for tuition on Book IV of the Aeneid. Before that he had to translate two hundred lines; with luck he might manage a hundred.

  *

  Andrew Matthews had not been impressed by the three pupils he had so far seen; they had been as unimaginative as they were unattractive. Perhaps the job had not after all been such a divinely given gift. But still there were three more to come today: the Honourable David Lifton, at six o’clock and Antony Chadwick at half past six. It was five to six now.

  He walked over to the window and drew the curtains. His mother had made his curtains and loose covers to the measurements he had sent and in the material of his choice a chintz pattern of anemones on a white background. On the walls were several Beardsley prints and over the fireplace the pièce de résistance of the entire room: an oil-painting of an overflowing cornucopia—apples, bananas, pineapples, even a fish escaped from the thing to be caressed by chubby and cherubic arms. He had seen it in a London junk shop while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. Though the theme was perhaps a little bit obvious it had undeniably been an opportunity not to be missed. The picture had lived through Cambridge with him and had followed him to America, where he had done a year’s postgraduate work at Yale. Of course it had been terribly expensive to ship, but as Matthews had said, ‘It enabled me to show the Americans a piece of artistic vulgarity; in the hope that it will enable them to combine artistry with their undoubted talent in the vulg
ar.’ He had even composed a couplet to be hung beneath it. A couplet regrettably unsuitable for his present occupation.

  ‘Tiny prick and pudgy arm,

  Wherein lies your foetal charm?’

  The series of speculative answers which had originally followed this question were not of the same order. Why did there have to be so many Bs in anatomical description? Somehow ‘Baroque buttocks, button eyes’ had been a staccato cadence out of keeping with the swelling curves of his cornucopian gambollers.

  It had always been a grief to Andrew Matthews that God had not given him slightly softer features. His nose was thin and sharp, his cheek-bones too pronounced and his chin definitely too pointed. He looked around his room with satisfaction before sitting down behind his table. The warm glow of his gas fire nicely counteracted the colder and more ethereal light cast through his bottle-green lampshade.

  He was wearing a polo-neck sweater which conveniently covered his slightly protruding Adam’s apple. Occasions which demanded a tie always annoyed him.

  A couple of minutes later David knocked and entered.

  Andrew gave no trace of his appreciation of this new arrival, but curtly offered him a seat.

  ‘I thought today we would talk about Book IV generally rather than getting down to translation straight away.’

  David nodded assent. He had only managed to translate fifty of the required two hundred lines.

  ‘First of all I’d like to ask you a few questions. I expect you’ve read the book in translation?’

  David nodded again.

  ‘Don’t you think Aeneas behaves rather badly to Dido?’

  ‘She does kill herself because he goes away.’

  ‘So you think he should have stayed?’ Andrew smiled benevolently, the perfect pedagogue.

  ‘Yes, if … if what happened …’

  David was blushing delightfully.

  ‘Go on‚’ said Andrew encouragingly.

  ‘If what happened in the cave is what seems to have happened.’

  Andrew listened amazed. What an incredibly mature appraisal, put with such delicate reticence and charming embarrassment.

  ‘So you think that after what happened in the cave he had pledged himself?’

  ‘Well, he shouldn’t have gone in there if he was going to leave Carthage and he must have known he would have to. I mean, he went to Carthage by mistake. He was shipwrecked.’

  ‘What you’re saying then is that he was selfish to try to find temporary consolation in a chance encounter when his destiny lay elsewhere.’

  ‘Yes … I mean … I think so.’

  Andrew looked at him sitting awkwardly on the edge of the sofa, and studied him more carefully … of course it would be ridiculous to feel sentimental at this early stage, but this boy was certainly unusual. It would be impossible to try and convince him of Aeneas’s higher role of founding Italy, after so deep an apprehension of the most intimate details of Aeneas’s relationship with Dido. He decided to try another topic.

  ‘You may perhaps remember that after Dido has fallen in love, Vergil represents her as a deer in flight running with the huntsman’s deadly barb still in her side, doomed although she runs. Why do you think this is such a good simile?’

  ‘Because she didn’t ask to fall in love, just like animals who don’t ask to be shot at.’

  ‘I like that‚’ said Andrew slowly.

  No mere textbook reiterations here. Fools like Crofts would label such freshness of appreciation ‘scholarship material’ and leave it at that. But here was what he had once been, before being choked by the cumbersome machinery of academic theories and pretentions. Andrew had always been keen on the idea of successors at school: boys who would keep up the fight against oafish heartiness and enthusiasm for games that stifled sensitivity. For a moment he forgot his Adam’s apple, and the angularity of his features. Now, exactly as he had wished, here was somebody seeing as he had seen, reacting as he had reacted, somebody almost reenacting his lost years.

  Andrew went on questioning and, as the half-hour drew towards a close, he became still more convinced that this was what he had come to Edgecombe for, to remember the past with all the love and self-pity of a dying man.

  *

  David was getting up to go. Perhaps a word of encouragement would strike the right note.

  ‘I think you have read this book most sensitively, yes, most sensitively,’ Andrew said, smiling.

  ‘Thank you.’

  That blush again, but was there, too, a half-unconscious slyness, almost a smirk of pleasure? What guilelessness to betray feelings so natural, so evidently. On the whole Andrew was relieved to see this look. During much of the lesson David’s face had worn an expression of reproachful melancholy. Those dark, dark eyes … Andrew watched helplessly as the door shut. How could anybody think of talking to this boy of unity of minds overriding sexual considerations, or of the more athletic angle of men striving together in body and mind? He envisaged a relationship of platonic beauty, where words would be almost irrelevant in their perfect and silent understanding. He looked up at the overflowing cornucopia and the cherubs. Ah, help me, my horn of plenty, to be strong; the flesh is weak, so weak, he sighed.

  Certainly the schoolmaster in love with his pupil was an obvious situation to be in, but couldn’t there be a tragic pathos in this obviousness, a fundamental simplicity, in this recurring pattern? A mixture of sublime, grotesque and tragic in this unacceptable position? ‘Public School Master in Squalid Case!’ He spirited away this sudden apparition, this foul judgement of an alien and insensitive society. Nothing would stop him. Yes, he would take David out into the country for a cream tea in a couple of weeks. He would look at him against a backcloth of frozen branches and the countryside. Andrew had seen a convenient-looking place when he had driven to the school the week before: The Woodpecker Tea-Room at Coombe Bassett. Quiet, intimate, and remote. As it happened this was not to take place till almost a month later. Before that a ’flu epidemic of unusually vicious proportions disrupted the ordered life of Greville. Amongst its first victims was David Lifton.

  Unaware of this future postponement of his plans, Andrew thought expectantly of Coombe Bassett. He went over to an arm-chair and sat down. A knock at the door heralded the arrival of Chadwick.

  The following day David and Chadwick were sitting in their study. In the third arm-chair sprawled a larger boy in football clothes. His knees were caked with mud and the room had already started to smell of sweat. This boy’s name was Hotson.

  ‘If you have to be in the Second Eleven there is still no reason for you to come in here and make the place muddy and smelling like a stables‚’ said Chadwick slowly, stressing each word.

  ‘This happens to be my room as well as yours.’

  ‘Yes, and it is mine too, and if David could be bothered to express an opinion I think he’d agree that you might change before coming up here…. I sit here peacefully read ing the papers and suddenly in comes bleeding Hercules …’

  David was looking at the carpet as though the grease stains had just acquired a new significance. His head had been throbbing most of the afternoon and he felt cold and shivery.

  ‘Well then, this being a great democracy, let’s put it to the vote. Those who want to see Hotson steaming like an overworked bull raise both their hands; those who do not raise their right hand.’

  ‘Very funny, can’t you even let a fellow rest before he has a shower?’

  ‘Raise your right hand you idiot‚’ said Chadwick in a menacing stage whisper to David.

  ‘Children, I’m just going‚’ said Hotson benignly.

  David already felt too ill to take any interest in either of them.

  ‘I wish you’d all shut up‚’ he said quietly.

  Chadwick got up and walked out.

  ‘Now that was foolish, very foolish‚’ Hotson was annoyed now for the first time. ‘We’ll have sour-face at it now for the next week. You have no feeling for psychology, Lifton, none at a
ll.’ He sighed with long-suffering exasperation. ‘He’s already cross at having a queer for a classics tutor, but now …’

  ‘I rather like Mr. Matthews as a matter of fact‚’ said David primly, adding, ‘you haven’t got an aspirin by any chance?’

  ‘No.’ Hotson got up and went over to the door. ‘You’d better ask the matron.’ He shut the door with a bang.

  When he had been a child, David had suffered from severe earache. As his headache increased he began to feel the familiar stabbing pains beneath his ears.

  *

  The sanatorium in Greville was a large airy room with four beds. The matron had taken his temperature and asked him to bring his pyjamas and dressing-gown over with him.

  From his bed he could see the Victorian chapel and, standing out darkly behind, the ridge of hills beyond Edgecombe. Two of the other beds were already occupied by ’flu victims. One was an older boy whom David knew only by name, and the other a junior he had known in Hall. All three felt too ill to want to talk.

  The other two got better and their beds were reoccupied by new tenants, but David, though the ’flu left him after only a week, continued to suffer from earache.

  At the end of ten days he was still no better. He watched yet another dawn breaking over the pinnacled chapel, having heard another night of sick-room murmurs and splutterings. The matron gave him codeine tablets, which he swallowed with hot tea served in practical blue-and-white-ringed mugs. He knew every crack and discoloration on the ceiling. Were the cracks rivers or roads? The blotches lakes or mountains? He tried to visualise it all in three dimensions.

  At noon the matron came with the school doctor, Dr. Blossom. He thoroughly examined David’s ears with the help of a small torch which he shone first in one ear and then in the other. He murmured to the matron and she nodded. Ten minutes later David heard that he was to go and see a London specialist the following Saturday. He was asked whether he had any relations in London with whom he could stay the night. He said that he had an uncle who might be in town that week-end. (David to avoid embarrassment, always referred to George as his uncle at school.) Could David write and find out for certain? He said he would.