Lessons, page 26
The school secretary had looked through the files and regretted that she could be of little help. Miss Cornell had left the school in 1965, twenty-five years ago. The forwarding address was Erwarton. The bursar, who had lived in the village all his life, thought Miss Cornell had moved to Ireland but was not sure of the date. She left no address with the neighbours. The secretary closed by wondering if Roland was aware that the school would be shutting down for good in July.
Their Saturday was like many others. Ritual tidying up the house, for which Lawrence gave willing token assistance. Scooting on Clapham Common, lunch at the Windmill pub with friends who had children Lawrence’s age. In the afternoon, a play at the children’s puppet theatre in Brixton, tea at the house of Lawrence’s current best friend, Ahmed, then home. Supper, bath, a thrilling game of snap, stories, bed.
That evening Roland copied out a couple of translated Arabic poems in celebration of wine and love for Epithalamium Cards. He suspected from Oliver Morgan’s evasive attitude lately that the enterprise was coming to an end or was about to change. That would be fine. He was tiring of it. He reread the letter from school. It had been on his mind during the day. He was surprised by the tension in his stomach at the sight of the familiar device at the top of the letter, a wolf’s head in profile with the Latin inscription underneath. Berners Hall. Five years of his life. All the routine, the deprivation, his turning away from friendships, his flight from her. It stirred him strangely to see her name in print as if in a book, and the name Erwarton. Moving to Ireland, without him. He stood up from the desk in his bedroom, peeped in at Lawrence and went downstairs to sprawl on an armchair. Yes, he felt the reverberation of old longings. The desperation. He had not seen her in twenty-six years and it had crept up on him, a hollow sense of being bereft. He indulged it. Why not? It was harmless. So was his indignation. She had left him behind. Where in Ireland, why, and doing what, and with whom? Another schoolboy perhaps.
In the summer holidays of 1964, he was staying with his sister and her first husband near Farnborough. Roland wanted a job—not easy in Germany, where his father, now the Major, had been posted. He was in his bedroom after work when he opened with shaky fingers the brown envelope that contained his O level results. He sat on the bed staring at the list, trying to make one particular letter look different. Eleven subjects and he hadn’t scraped through one. The flimsy printed slip with “F” by every subject was a physical shock. Even English. Everyone said you had to be a moron to fail English. Even music. He hadn’t bothered to learn the right kind of stuff. No sixth form then, no English, French and German A levels, no university. He had always thought he’d get through a half-dozen O levels on his wits. Eleven times “F,” machine-printed like a telegram, delivered to inform him eleven times over what a Failure, a Fraud and a Fool he was. He was almost sixteen. The examiners had not been impressed by his precocious sexual experience.
That summer he had been working as a labourer for a landscape-gardening company. He was getting half the adult wage. He hated it. The boss, the man they called the gaffer, frightened him. Now it could become his sort of life. With these results the school would not accept him in the sixth form. Most boys clocked up nine or ten passes. He was out.
It was fortunate that his parents had both left school at fourteen and would not grasp the scale of his disaster. His father had lied about his age to join the army at the age of seventeen. He was a great believer in starting at the bottom. Rosalind went straight from school into service as a chambermaid. In the wider family no one was expected to stay on at school past sixteen. No one ever had. The shame was all his own. He couldn’t even tell his sister. Susan would have been cheerful and consoling, full of practical advice. The only contemporary he could have told would have been the boy with a worse result. That was not possible. He knew what he had to do, and it was making him sick with anticipation because he knew what she would say. The phone box was half a mile away. He reversed the charges as usual. As soon as she picked up he told her.
Miriam said simply, “They won’t take you back.”
“No.”
“So what now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have a plan?”
“No.”
“Then you’d better come and live with me.”
He felt his legs go weak. He slumped against the side of the kiosk. His heart hurt from thumping. If someone had tapped on the glazed door and offered him eleven grade “A” passes, he would have had to refuse.
“I’d have to get a job.”
“No you don’t. Just come. I’ll look after you. You’ll be fine.”
He was silent, as if thinking this through. But she already knew his answer.
The next day he was back to digging drainage ditches with two older men, well into their forties. They were working on a patch of weedy land under the flight path of the Farnborough airfield. All day, fighter jets and lumbering transport planes screamed or thundered above him. Too close. At first he had instinctively ducked as they came in. It was impossible not to stop digging and watch them. But it became possible because the gaffer, Mr. Heron, shouted at them afterwards. In terms as loud as the fighters he reminded them that they were not paid to be plane spotters.
The previous month all the papers had carried the new pictures of the moon sent back by an American spacecraft. A thousand times better than any image seen through a telescope. The sharp images of craters and their shadows had excited him. Everyone involved must have had far more qualifications than he would ever have. So too did the pilots dropping bombs on north Vietnam. Even some of the Beatles, still triumphant across America, had been to art college. Mick Jagger had been to the LSE. All weekend Roland luxuriated in premonitions of doom, even as he knew he was deceiving himself. The reality was overwhelming in its simplicity. He had no other choice. He had been condemned to a life of erotic bliss.
On Monday after work, he found another letter, handwritten, postmarked Ipswich. Good news. Mr. Clayton, the English teacher, was writing to explain that he had intervened with the headmaster. At first he had made no headway. Then the physics teacher, Mr. Bramley, had pitched in. Next, Mr. Clare had told the tone-deaf head that Baines was a “one-in-a-million” pianist and had shown him the Norwich press cutting. Reluctantly, an exception was granted. It was agreed that Baines was a bright boy whose potential was obscured by his exam results. He was permitted after all to join the sixth form in September. “You’re going to have to work hard,” Clayton wrote. “You’d be a bloody fool not to. Peter Bramley, Merlin Clare and I are out on a limb here pleading your case. Don’t you dare let us down. I’ve written to your parents to tell them we’re expecting you. Don’t worry. I’ve assumed you haven’t told them your results.”
Roland took the letter upstairs, removed his boots and lay on the bed. Two years ago, for just ten minutes, he had impressed the physics teacher. Not since. He had approached him after class. His question was genuine. If he tied a piece of string to one end of a twelve-inch ruler and pulled gently, but not enough to overcome the friction between the ruler and the table it rested on, then something must be happening between the front of the ruler where the string was attached and the far end. Some force or tension was running from front to back. And if he pulled a little harder, the ruler would start to move, all of it, front and back at the same time. So information of a sort must be instantaneously transmitted along the ruler. And yet Mr. Bramley had told the class that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.
He had been too interested in the cleverness of his question to remember the explanation the physics teacher had given. Two years later Roland wished he had kept his mouth shut. And what had he ever done to impress Mr. Clayton? It must have been his Lord of the Flies essay. As Roland lay on the bed, gaze fixed on one polystyrene ceiling tile, he accepted that he had truly deceived himself. His terrible exam results had promised a grand adventure. A beautiful break with routine, a wild sortie, a liberation, a Gurji camp at the time of Suez. Now, without his permission, the adventure had been cancelled and a weight of expectation, of duty and boring scholarly labour had been laid on him. He had been devising a simple explanation for his parents. He had been about to tell them he did not want more school. He wanted to get on with life. His father would have understood and his mother had no voice in the matter. After a personal letter from his teacher they would be proud of him staying on, and naturally insistent.
When he told Miriam on the phone she was angry with everyone. He knew she would be. She was also seductive.
“That Clayton’s an idiot. I know him. Always interfering. It’s none of his business.”
“I know.”
“You’re old enough to be making your own decisions.”
“I’ll still be coming to see you. It’ll be just like before.”
“I want you here all the time.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to leave school. I want you in my bed.”
He supported himself against the kiosk door. His head was light. It was getting hard to breathe in the narrow space.
“All night, do you understand? And in the morning. Waking up together every morning. Can you imagine that?”
“Yes.” He said it faintly and she didn’t hear him. He repeated the word, the delicious fateful assent. To the night, to the morning.
“So you’re leaving school.”
“OK. I will…but I can’t. Look, I’ll think about it.”
“You’ll phone me again in one hour.”
This continued over many calls. When he listened to her he was ready to obey. He was almost sixteen and he was free to choose. She was right. He had to be with her. All night, every night. The rest was trivial. When he came away from the phone box he was back in the real world, with real people and what they were doing for him and wanting from him. He had already written a letter of thanks to his English teacher. He had confirmed to his parents that he would be staying on at school for his A levels, English, French and German. Another two years. But Miriam was also the real world and she was the only one actually talking to him.
It took courage to say to her during one conversation, “But what am I going to do all day while you’re out teaching?”
She didn’t hesitate. “You’ll stay in your pyjamas and wait for me. I’ll lock your clothes in the shed.”
They both began to laugh. He knew that this was a tease. That really, she expected him to be back at school. But he was powerfully drawn to the idea of himself in pyjamas all day with just one purpose in life. Finally they reached a compromise. He would come to her well before term started and then…
She said it softly over the phone. “My darling, we will see.”
Rather than confront Mr. Heron, Roland walked out on the job, sacrificing a week’s wages. He had saved sixty pounds in one-pound notes, a thick wad inside his buttoned-up back pocket as he followed a porter with his trunk and saw it loaded into the guard’s van of the Liverpool Street train to Ipswich. She was waiting on the platform for him. In greeting, they hardly touched each other or spoke. That was for later. In silence they hauled his trunk over the footbridge. Roland was pleased that when he showed his child’s ticket to the inspector at the gate, he wouldn’t believe he was under sixteen. He was ready for that and showed his passport.
Miriam said, “See. He’s not a cheat. You should apologise.”
The man, not so old, but short and shrivelled, spoke quietly to her. “Just doing my job, ma’am.”
She put her hand on his arm and said warmly, “I know you are. I know you are.” As they crossed the gloomy concourse, they had a fit of giggles. He admired the way she had parked right outside the station, half on the pavement, right under a “no parking” sign. For him. A joyous sensation of freedom hit him hard, right in his chest. Of course, he wasn’t going back to school. What reckless folly that would be. With an effort they squeezed his trunk onto the back seat of her car. The rear door would not close. She took some string from her handbag and passed it to him. He threaded the handles of the trunk and door together, secured them with a reef knot. He felt not only liberated but capable, more so when he sat beside her and they kissed at length with no thought for the scores of passengers coming out of the station entrance. Kissing in a car! In his swoon he felt he was in a movie, that this was Paris, not Ipswich. He should take up smoking, however much—to his shame—tobacco repelled him. They had not seen each other in five weeks. Even in his most dedicated fantasies, he had forgotten so much. The warmth, the feel of her, now the touch of her hand on his nape, and then her tongue. He was in the early approaches, the long ice-slide of an orgasm, right here in her car. That never happened in Truffaut movies. Wisely, gently, he pulled away from her. She reached down in one smooth movement to turn the ignition key and flick the car into gear and bump off the kerb and into the flow of traffic. She was so much more in control than he was. He must learn to be cool.
But ten minutes later, as they turned onto the narrow road by the boatyard and went along the foreshore, he experienced some churning minutes of excitement and dread. This was the familiar route he had first taken with his parents on the 202 bus on a warm day like this. Now, the big blue space of river and sky belittled him, pulled him back into bewildered childhood. There was nothing in this landscape which did not anticipate the destination and his immediate future. Berners Hall. The oak trees on the far bank were school trees. Likewise the telegraph poles and their dipping wires, the uncommon pastel green of the roadside grass, the warm air that carried the rotten salt mud tang of the foreshore. A school smell. All of it belonged to school, and so did he.
“You’ve gone quiet,” she said. They were passing the concrete water tower at the Freston crossroads. Another school item.
“Beginning of term feeling.”
She put her hand on his knee. “We’ll see about that.”
They carried his trunk up the garden path, into the house and set it down in the sitting room. His name stencilled on the lid announced his proud return.
She stood close to him, kissed him lightly, unzipped his jeans and fondled him as she spoke. “It can’t stay there, can it?”
“No.”
“We’ll put it straight in the shed.”
He laughed.
She turned from him and gripped a handle.
“Lift your end.”
They carried the trunk through the kitchen and into the garden. They put it down while she unfastened the padlock on the shed door. While he waited it seemed to him that he was hundreds of feet below murky water, that light and sound were denied him and desire was the pressure of many tons. He would do anything she asked. They pushed the mower aside and heaved the trunk in among the spades, hoes and rakes. When she had shut the door and snapped the padlock onto the hasp, she kissed him again and plucked at his shirt. “These are coming off anyway. Upstairs.”
They were standing close in the centre of the small lawn, looking into each other’s eyes. A small tree cast some broken shade over them. Her eyes appeared to bulge and there were tiny scraps of colour he had never seen before, fragments of yellow, orange and blue, mere pinpricks around her pupils. It came to him, a passing treacherous thought, that she was indeed mad, like some boys said. She was completely mad and was keeping it a secret from him. Even as the idea frightened him, it also thrilled him that she might be out of her mind, beyond self-control and he would have to go with her, go down with her into some hellish paradise. This was his adventure, his journey. Most would be too scared to go on it. Others wanted dull and reliable partners. He put his hand under her skirt and as his finger moved lightly over her, as she had taught him, she murmured a long sentence in a low monotone, most of which he did not catch. The repeated word “have” was all he heard. He would have felt an idiot, asking her to say it all over again.
They went indoors. Roland took her hand and led her up the stairs. The bedroom was in perfect summer order. The windows were open to the late afternoon sun. The tide was full on the River Stour. The bedcovers were neatly stripped back from the laundered and ironed sheet. He undressed her where she stood, on the faded yellow rug, guided her to the bed, spread her legs and with his tongue performed for her in respectful silence what they called in one of their private jokes, Prelude No. 1. Then he went into the bathroom to wash. The little pink room with the sloping floor was also full on to the sun. As he took off his shirt he saw himself in the mirror. Weeks of digging trenches for Mr. Heron had served his torso well. He looked amazing, he decided. Fierce light from one side enhanced the effect. It needed to be inscribed in memory, he thought, how good he felt, how his every action had a discrete and beautiful flow as though he moved to the sound of an orchestra. The theme from Exodus. And such glorious anticipation of what was about to happen. He raised one arm to tense his biceps and turned to catch sight in the mirror of the muscles across his back. Cool. She called his name impatiently from the bedroom.
