by A. J. Cronin
‘Mother,’ Scott said, ‘this is Carroll. I’ve asked him to tea.’
She smiled pleasantly, viewing us all, not with the outgiving affection my own mother would have shown, but with a certain aristocratic, faintly amused contraction of her brows which, to my shame, I now preferred.
‘How did the match go?’
‘We won, naturally,’ Scott said offhandedly.
‘Behold the two heroes, Mother. I made a duck.’
‘Oh, you wretch, Harry. Never mind, you’ll have tea with me when I’ve finished cutting.’ Turning to go, she said: ‘Then you may tell me all about it.’
Scott led the way into the house, through the hall and along a passage at the back to a green baize-covered service door.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said, pushing open the door. ‘You won’t mind coming in here?’
Gaily, in a free and easy manner, I followed them to the kitchen which was large, white-tiled and well lit. At the window a smartly dressed maid was polishing silver while a stout cook, with her back to us, was at the stove bending over the oven.
‘We’d like some ginger beer, Bridgie.’
‘Take it then,’ said the cook, over her shoulder. ‘But leave these pancakes be, Master Harry, they’re for the mistress’s tea.’
Harry, who knew his way about, had supplied us with glasses of stone ginger beer, when the cook swung round and straightened, exposing to us a full red amiable face set with a pair of button black eyes. I stiffened, choked on my ginger beer. I recognized her instantly. Bridget O’Halloran, staunch devotee of St Mary’s and leading member of the Guild of St Teresa. Did she know me? Idiotic, futile question. Had she not sat beside me in church, walked in the same procession, even passed me occasionally on her afternoon off as she went to the church and I emerged from school? If this damning evidence was not enough, her stare of wondering surprise that plainly said ‘What is he doing here, where he doesn’t belong, with Master Scott and Master Harry?’ would surely have convinced me. And now her expression had changed. I saw that she distrusted and resented my upstart appearance in a society so far above me, a sphere where as an old and privileged servant she had the right to feel at home. I was an offence against the sound established order that she believed in as firmly as she did the Communion of Saints.
She placed herself in a conversational attitude, one hand on her hip.
‘You have a new friend, Master Scott?’
‘Decidedly,’ he agreed, drinking deeply.
‘That’s nice. He’ll be at the Beechfield with you?’
‘No, Bridgie,’ Harry interposed. ‘For your private information, he has a weak chest and doesn’t go to school at present.’
‘Indeed now, that’s interesting. And where does he get his education like?’
‘He has a tutor.’
‘A tutor is it?’
Disregarding Master Harry, who was now helping himself to pancakes, she fixed me with a chilly, penetrating stare. Yet her tone was persuasive as, in a meditative manner, she queried:
‘But surely … haven’t I seen you in Clay Street with a school satchel?’
I affected an incredulous smile. It was a feeble effort.
‘Of course not.’
‘Strange,’ she pursued. ‘I could have sworn it was you. Down by St Mary’s School?’
I was pale. The smile had stiffened on my lips. Ineffectually I tried an edging movement towards the door.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You’re sure it wasn’t you?’
‘I’m dead positive,’ I said violently. ‘What the dickens would I be doing down there?’
She considered me for a long moment, then said slowly:
‘And the cock crowed thrice.’
Master Harry went into a fit of laughter.
‘Silly Bridgie. And the cock crowed. Cock-a-doodle-do.’
But Scott-Hamilton, unsmiling, was looking at me very curiously.
‘Shut up, Harry. Let’s clear out.’
Tea in the drawing-room where, basking in glory, I had hoped to shine, was a torment. Despite Mrs Scott-Hamilton’s puzzled efforts, conversation flagged and died. As soon as I could, I said that I must go.
‘Must you?’ said Scott, getting up immediately. ‘Pity you have to leave,’ he said with cold politeness, having escorted me to the front door.
‘I have to meet someone,’ I said.
He raised his eyebrows with a faint, contemptuous smile.
‘The tutor?’ These were his parting words.
I went out of the house and along the avenue, past the two gardeners, the peach house, and the twin tennis courts. Sick with shame and blind with rage I saw nothing. All the hot bitterness of my burning heart was directed against Scott, against all the Scott-Hamiltons, against Beechfield, the cricket club, the entire world, most of all against myself. I loathed and despised myself with a searing and corroding violence that, while it must end in abysmal misery, kept me striding instinctively, in some such manner as the murderer is compelled to return to the scene of his crime, towards St Mary’s. Had Bridget’s final words stung so fiercely as to stir in my perfidious soul emotions of compunction and contrition that could be assuaged only by a solitary visit to the church? If so, I did not reach that haven of penitence. Beyond the Victoria library at the junction of the main road and Clay Street a game was in progress, a low, common vulgar game of ‘kick the can’ played in the public thoroughfare by a ragged scattering of my schoolfellows. My eyes dilated. Here, I thought, are my compeers. Welcomed by acclamation, unmindful of my patrician clothes, I flung myself into the game, running, sliding, kicking, falling in the gutter, shouting and sweating, revelling in the awareness that I was shedding the spurious veneer with which for the past two months I had encased myself.
In the midst of one hectic mêlée I heard a shrill exclamation of dismay. I looked up. An elderly lady in a spotted veil and a feather boa, with a bundle of library books under her arm, was gazing at me in horror. She was Miss Galbraith, one of Miss Greville’s tea-party friends who played the violin and painted nicely in watercolours, and to whom, not long before, I had made my bow.
‘Laurence! What are you doing! With these dreadful little ragamuffins!’
‘Playing.’
‘Oh, no, no, not with these frightful young hooligans. You must go home at once.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Do come away with me, dear.’ She took my arm. ‘You must.’
‘No,’ I shouted, breaking free. ‘I won’t come away. These are my friends. You can go to h––l.’
The game proceeded until dusk. I did not give up until I felt myself completely purged. Then, pledging myself to more games when school took up next week, I set out for home, with a tear in the knee of my flannel trousers, exhausted, dirty, and sad, but for the moment at peace.
Chapter Eighteen
Oh, the dreariness of that ensuing winter when, under perpetually weeping skies, I passed, with lowered head, a shadow of myself, to and from St Mary’s School, travelling by the unfrequented back road, avoiding all that pertained to Beechfield in such a manner as my peasant ancestors had shunned the famine-stricken, typhus-ridden town of Bandon. Unhappily this alternative route presented me, on occasions, with a painful reminder of my fallen state since it was unpredictably the choice of the St Anne’s junior ‘crocodile’, thus confronting me at a turn of the road with a double line of young girls, swinging along in their fetching green uniforms, aristocratic, arrogant, yes, all of them arrogant to the point of insolence, and to whom I must yield the pavement by stepping humbly into the gutter. As I stood there, an ignored obscenity, one in particular held my eye, a captivating little blonde with long double flaxen pigtails that swung with her dashing step. She it was who, by her fascinations, confirmed my outcast state. By chance I even learned her name. As she swept past with her indubitably snub nose in the air and never a side glance, her partner in the parade remarked, in the high, affected
Ardfillan voice: ‘Oh, I say, Ada, how absolutely jolly!’ Resuming my way, Ada became the touchstone of the unattainable, the token of my miseries, the central figure in fantasies which I created, not only by day but more often at night, in bed, before I fell asleep. Then Ada, dear Ada, watched rapturously, in company with Heston and George Gunn, while I carried my bat for a century at Lord’s. Permutations and combinations of my Ada complex transported me, the brilliance, the mutual admiration in our exchanges dazzled me. How often did she lean towards me and exclaim: ‘Oh, I say, Laurie, how absolutely jolly!’ And on what flights was I borne by her daily letters!
Dear Laurie,
How can I thank you enough for the exquisite orchids. And how splendid your being so friendly with Lady Meikle that she allowed you to pick them in her beautiful big conservatory. I will keep them as a constant reminder of your thoughtfulness.
Please don’t imagine I didn’t see you when I passed the other day. I had to pretend not to.
Have you been to the moor lately? It would be nice if we could meet there one day. But of course we are kept in very strictly at St Anne’s. That’s why it is so jolly to be able to write you.
Affectionately yours, Ada
I wrote these letters after my homework and dropped them into the letter-box so that I should find them when I set out for school next morning. On my way to Clay Street I read them with a beatific smile fixed upon my lips, which, alas, slowly faded as cold reality dissolved a dream, springing not from any seductiveness Ada might offer, but only from yearning for her esteem.
Fortunately, after some weeks I began to be bored with Ada. Perhaps she was tired of me, for her letters noticeably cooled off and eventually ceased. But it is truer to say that she was supplanted by a humbler being, possibly more worthy of my affection. I had fallen in love with Amoeba Proteus.
The chance discovery of an elementary textbook of zoology of Miss Greville’s entitled Pond Life had sent me, idly at first, in pursuit of the protozoa. But it was a chase which, to my salvation, soon became a passion, supplanting my botanical researches of the past year, convincing me that I must become a scientist.
As spring came in I returned from my moorland expeditions not with a packed vasculum but with scum-filled jars that teemed with fascinating life and which, once my eye was glued to the tube of Miss Greville’s Zeiss, gave me the entry to an unknown world peopled with amazing microscopic creatures whose elaborate activities, from the swallowing of diatoms and formation of food vacuoles to the halving of chromosomes and division of the nucleus in the final act of partition, filled me with wonder, an emotion that intensified as, passing from these primary cells, I came upon rarer and wilder inhabitants of this subaqueous jungle, the solitary volvox, the whirling rotifer, the shapely polystomella. And what joy, when, one March evening, a glorious paramecium, with all its cilia waving, swam majestically through the green algae into my field of vision.
This was the interest that truly sustained me during a period of dullness and uncertainty when I felt that I was getting nowhere. I realized that St Mary’s could take me no further and that I was soon due to leave. Yet I dared not ask my mother what the future held for me. In her face now there was a reserve that forbade my question, an expression that I did not wish to read yet which instinctively I recognized as an omen contrary to all my hopes.
At first, through sympathy for her, and the general regard for Father, she had done well enough with the agency. But gradually the decline had set in, competition increased, and more and more she came back with a thinning order book and a set, harassed expression, the presage to increasing economies that dispelled the blessed ambience of security in which I had hitherto lived.
As the months went on it became more and more apparent how painfully short we were of money. Particularly in our diet was this stringency noticeable, for although worse was in store for me, Mother now concentrated on the cheapest and most nourishing foods, such things as baked beans, boiled salt codfish and cottage pie, which I accepted with an added sense of grievance, since it must now be revealed that those sustaining lunches with which Miss Greville had regaled my pampered stomach had practically ceased.
This, indeed, touched another of our problems, a mysterious enigma, surrounding my benefactress, that passed my present understanding. Miss Greville, caught up in new and unforeseen activities, was seldom in for lunch. When I came back from school at the midday recess, hoping against hope, I would be met in the hall by Campbell who, with a grim smile that made my heart sink, would remark: ‘Lunch is not being served today, Master Carroll.’ She gave always to the ‘ Master’ an imperceptible sardonic inflection that, intensifying my sense of deprivation, wounded me deeply as, my nostrils dilating to the good smells of Campbell’s own lunch coming from the kitchen, I slowly went upstairs where, on the alcove table, I would find a pencilled note left by Mother: Soup in the pot on the stove for you to heat, dear. And some cold rice pudding in the cupboard.
What, I asked myself repeatedly, was happening to Miss Greville? Towards Mother and myself she was more forthcoming, more gaily affectionate, than ever. Yet it seemed as though in this effusiveness Mother found something oppressive. At first she had been pleased to be invited to those little tea parties, and even to play and sing there. But now, returning tired and dispirited from Winton, she was apparently in no mood for such festivities, and only once during the previous six months when Miss Greville had entertained her few St Anne’s friends to a musical evening had she attended, with reluctance, and then because she felt it in obligation to play, or at least to accompany Miss Greville’s performance on the cello. After this event she had returned depressed and with a disinclination for further social intercourse. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that the more Miss Greville offered intimacy, the more my mother had withdrawn from it, not obtrusively, but rather with discretion, as though anxious to moderate these approaches. I particularly noticed this reserve in Mother’s manner on Sundays when Miss Greville, sumptuously dressed for church in a high-waisted cream costume, an enormous exuberant hat on top of her chignon, a parasol in her white-gloved hands, and exuding a faint smell of Parma violets, came upstairs to be approved.
‘Does this suit me? Will I do, Grace? Am I fit to be seen?’
Envisaging that full, richly moulded figure, Mother repressively replied:
‘You will certainly be seen.’
‘I believe so.’ Miss Greville smiled confidently. ‘And why not, dear Grace?’
Of course Miss Greville had always been an assiduous churchgoer, and her penchant for remarkable attire was no secret to me, yet in these over-elaborate Sunday toilettes there must surely be some meaning which so far had escaped me. Nevertheless I, as opposed to Mother, welcomed every sign and symptom, no matter how displayed, of Miss Greville’s partiality. Not only did I admire her intensely—‘look up to her’ is perhaps the better phrase—I knew all too well what she had done for me. And I dared to hope that she would do more. Indeed, her interest in me now seemed the only chance of bringing me what I most desired.
This thought was in my mind when one March day, as still occasionally happened, I was lucky enough to find Miss Greville at home. Lunch was being served. Rejoicing that I need not, for once, face up to cold rice pudding, I washed and brushed my hair with unusual care before entering the dining-room. She greeted me with a bright appraising smile. If sadness reigned in our part of the house, here surely the reverse held sway. Miss Greville, during these past deadly months, had been consistently animated.
‘You are presentable, Carroll,’ she remarked approvingly, as I placed her chair. ‘Indeed, extremely so. Rather a different person from that scrubby little window-breaker of … how long ago?’
‘Four years, Miss Greville.’
I do not recall how our conversation developed after that promising opening. I do not doubt that it was interesting, since this remarkable woman had an extraordinary gift of stimulating and often bizarre talk and had even taught me to res
pond in a civilized manner and, apparently, with intelligence. Today, however, I was at first too busily engaged with some excellent roast beef to give her my complete attention. But of the ending of that lunch my memory is exact, my recollection unforgettably clear. She had proceeded to the window with her cup of coffee according to invariable habit, and after remaining rather longer than usual returned to the table in a mood which I rightly judged to be communicative.
‘You are remarkably discreet, Carroll,’ she began, looking at me intently, yet amiably.
‘Am I, Miss Greville?’
‘And, thanks to me, well mannered. So often, during our moments of agreeable intimacy, you have observed me go to the window, yet never once have you chosen to inquire why.’
‘That would not have been polite.’ Falling into her mood I mouthed this appalling answer like a well-behaved little prig. For that roast beef, with my eye on a second helping, I would have made myself a triple prig.
‘But you’ve been curious?’ she pressed, unwilling to dismiss the subject. ‘Admit the soft impeachment.’
Scarcely knowing whether it would be to my advantage to admit or deny I eventually inclined my head soberly.
‘I was curious, Miss Greville.’
‘But you didn’t guess?’
‘I imagined you were waiting for a friend, who passed here regularly every day.’
‘Well done, Carroll!’
She seemed so pleased at my deduction that my inveterate wish to shine drove me to continue.
‘And whoever it was would naturally see you there.’
She smiled.
‘It would be rather pointless if there were not an exchange of glances. The human eye, Carroll, as a means of communication is more expressive than the tongue. More subtle too, and truer. The tongue can lie, the eye, never. More beef?’
‘Please, Miss Greville.’
While I partook of another juicy slice she kept playing absently with her long chain necklace of ivory beads, that odd little smile coming and going on her lips.
