by Sue Gee
What were they destined for, with unemployment still at a record high? The Army, that was more than likely, and who knew when they’d be called up? The Fusiliers were out on the moor most weekends and some evenings, tramping over the heather, scattering the sheep. And in June the RAF had had a recruitment drive: Armstrong, reading the paper at lunchtime, said there’d been a thousand new recruits on the first day.
‘Sir? Sir, I’d love to fly, wouldn’t you?’
The next week, the government announced the doubling of anti-aircraft forces.
‘Sir, does that mean we’ll be shooting planes down?’
Scanning the stately clouds above the Square, so still in the summer heat, it was hard to imagine such things.
. . . sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake . . .
Taking a class in the Sixth it was different: he knew Frank had liked to discuss things, to open up questions, get them to form their own views. He’d never taught the Sixth before: it felt something of a privilege, to be with these bright, hard-working boys. Already, they knew almost as much as he did.
As Acting Head, the other thing he had to do was check his staff’s reports, as Frank had done. ‘It’s just a matter of form, I know they’ll be impeccable.’ Now, he would have to check Dunn’s.
‘Mr Dunn? Would you mind?’
They sat side by side at the staffroom table, the papers spread out before them. He ran his finger down the list of marks, as Frank had done.
‘I see Makin has done poorly again.’
‘Makin is a troublesome boy.’ Dunn lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke out over the table. His fingers shook, as always. ‘You’ll see that Ingham has done quite well. I’m pleased with Ingham.’
‘Yes, that’s splendid.’ Steven skimmed over each boy’s Remarks. ‘Pays insufficient attention . . . Needs to revise much more thoroughly . . . A disappointing term . . . Very weak . . .’
He hesitated. ‘I know that Embleton always tried to begin with something positive . . . Do you think that’s a good idea?’
Dunn drew on his cigarette, and coughed unpleasantly. ‘If there is something positive to say, Coulter, I will say it. Most of these boys – well, you don’t need me to amplify.’
For a moment Steven felt a wave of irritation. Dunn had a job, and was lucky to have it. He was lucky that the staff – and the boys – put up with him: his awkwardness, his temper, his complaints and strange solitary ways. Then he felt ashamed: the man had been through hell. He deserved to have a job. And he thought of him, all of a sudden, weeping in the Christmas carol service, and of what the Christmas holidays, and the summer, must be like for such a man – weeks stretching ahead, with few friends, and perhaps no family. He remembered his own dreadful loneliness last summer, and on impulse – making the kind of gesture Frank would make, he realised – he invited him to the Trio’s summer concert.
George insists we must do it for Frank, Margot had written, and I suppose we feel the same . . .
‘Do come. It’s out at the Embleton place at Great Whitton.’ He stacked up the heap of reports. ‘Miss Heslop will be playing, of course, and Embleton’s sister – you remember her?’
He smiled as Dunn flushed a little, and stammered out that he’d think about it, the Christmas concert had been rather good. Even Dunn would remember Diana.
When he got home, a letter was waiting in the wooden box. He tucked it into his pocket and walked up the track, spring mud turned into hard-packed ruts by the summer heat. A newly -sheared ewe was sunning herself by the cottage door: she got up at his approach, and trotted away. He dropped his bag, pulled out the creamy envelope, kissed it, sat down on the grass.
Darling Steven,
Thank you so much for your last letter. I do understand how much you’re having to do in the wake of Frank’s departure, but please come and see me soon. Everything still feels – oh, so shaken up and dreadful. That Frank could be killed, that George almost was: I can’t stop thinking about it. I suppose I never thought that such things could happen to us – how blinkered we’ve all been. Now we’re trying to keep steady and rehearse, but I need you – don’t you need me? And I feel I must tell you something about Frank which has upset me so much . . . Please come . . .
Far below in the valley, the grey stone farm buildings lay so solidly in the tranqil afternoon. He could make out the farmer crossing the yard, and his dog padding after him, as always. These things – these timeless English things: like Orwell’s great shining horses, and slow-moving streams; like the boys filing into Assembly, or ragging about in the Square – they brought comfort, connection, meaning: to him, and to generations stretching away behind him. Were they, as Orwell predicted, all about to be blown apart by bombs?
Everything still feels – oh, so shaken up and dreadful . . .
While he, at school, was caught up and distracted by things that just had to be done, Margot was weeping, he could sense it in every line. And what did she need to tell him?
He got up, went indoors, and wrote to her.
Forgive me, forgive me, my darling. Term ends on Wednesday: I’ll come the next day.
A baking afternoon. The trees in the lane approaching the Hall were motionless, the field cattle standing close together in the shade, swishing away the flies. The air was full of the smell of cowpats, and grass turning slowly to hay. The birds had stopped singing – no need for song now, their courtship and endless feeding over, the fledglings gone – and only his footsteps sounded as he turned the last bend in the lane. Already, yesterday’s rush and roar was fading.
‘Praise my soul, the King of Heaven,
To His feet thy footsteps bring . . .’
Straughan always chose that one for the last day of the summer term, and no one doubted that he knew quite well that the lusty singing of both staff and boys was as much about the end of lessons, confinement, homework, marking, exams, the whole exhausting business of it, as gratitude for the intervention in their lives of saints, angels and God Almighty.
‘Praise Him! Praise Him!
Praise the everlasting King.’
It rang, you might say, to the rafters.
‘Have a very good summer, boys.’ Straughan stood towering on the stage in his gown, and the wave of mingled relief, respect and affection was almost palpable in the chorus of ‘And you, sir,’ which ran around the hall.
Then it was all packing up books, clearing desks, prefects checking the cloakrooms for the last bit of cricket kit, the last unmatched sock, and out in ragged order across the playground.
‘Have a good summer, Mr Coulter.’
‘Thank you, Hindmarsh. And you.’
What did the weeks ahead hold for most of these boys? Fishing in the Burn, walking in the hills, mooching about. A trip to the coast if they were lucky. Helping out at home: what was that like?
‘Me Dad’s still on National Assistance.’
‘Me Dad’s joining up with the RAF. Ground work, he says.’
In the roar of bombs there was employment at last: an uneasy thought.
‘Sir, do you think Mr Embleton will be back next term?’
‘Let’s hope so, Todd.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Coulter, sir.’
‘Goodbye, Herron. The very best of luck.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Off to Oxford. Frank’s world. And where was Frank now? Had the last push begun?
There were the gates of the Hall. When he reached them, he stopped, and listened for music, realising that he longed to hear it, that it was a part of him now – and yes, she was playing to welcome him, that was how it felt, something plangent and melodic which he knew he had heard before. It came floating out of the open windows, and his thirst and fatigue were forgotten. He walked through to the drive, his jacket slung over his shoulder, saw the dog flopped down in the corner shadow o
f the porch. He looked up at his approach, and his tail thumped, but he didn’t get up: this wasn’t a stranger, and he was too hot to move.
Steven went on, stopped, and stood listening for a moment to the sound of the piano, looking about him. Was something different? Something felt missing. He frowned, then realised. Of course: the swing. The cedar stretched emptily over the grass, and now he could see that the branch had been sawn away. That would be Barrow – Barrow, who had raced out of the kitchen garden to save a distraught young man quite beyond his ken, but whom he had known since childhood.
If we hadn’t got there, he might have been just in time. Might. I can still hardly bear to think of it . . .
Walking slowly on towards the terrace, he tried once again to imagine it all, shrinking, as everyone did, from that ‘might’. And then there came a sound from far across the garden, and he froze. Someone was weeping, weeping in the most terrible way, as if shocked beyond measure. He looked quickly across the lawn, saw the door of the little summer house burst open, and Diana come flying out over the grass, her hands to her face and her hair streaming out behind her. In the house, the music stopped abruptly.
For a second he thought: Frank’s been killed. Frank’s been killed, she’s just heard. Oh, Jesus. And then, just as suddenly, he saw the tall figure of Thomas Heslop come out after her. For a moment he stood stock-still beneath the trees, and in the same moment Steven realised what Margot – quite by chance? – had been playing, and he knew.
Dream Children . . . And while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding . . .
Heslop had stood gazing. For years he had watched a beautiful little girl grow into an entrancing young woman. He had watched her, and longed for her: an exquisitely desirable thing a generation younger, young enough to be his daughter; his daughter’s dearest friend, surely beyond his reach. Now, with Frank gone, with everyone in turmoil, he had reached for her.
‘Diana—’ Steven stepped forward as she flew towards the house.
She stopped dead, and looked at him wildly. Then: ‘Leave me alone!’ And she ran on, past the sleeping dog and in through the open porch door.
Into the hush which followed, the grandfather clock began to strike. Three o’clock on a summer afternoon: such deep steady sounds striking through the heat, as if everything, eternally, would stay the same.
Steven stood on the terrace. What should he do? Bees droned in the lavender, the dog’s long sighs of sleep went on and on. Across the lawn, Heslop still stood beneath the trees, and even from here, as he dared to look at him, Steven could see he was utterly changed. He was grey, all the life drained out of him. For a moment their eyes met, and then he turned and walked down the great length of the garden, still keeping to the shade. He had acted, and now his heart was breaking: it was visible in every step he took.
The hall was empty, the drawing room was empty, a score lying on the floor by the piano. Swept aside as Margot leapt to her feet, hearing that wild weeping? Steven walked over, past the great slabs of sunlight falling in at the windows, and picked it up. And as he stood there in the silence, reading the mysterious, aching lines of the epigraph once more, it felt as if the whole house were suspended in time, that ghosts and dreams and longings haunted it, even on a summer afternoon.
We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been . . .
Out in the hall, the clock struck the quarter hour: a quarter of a phrase which longed for its completion – unmusical though he had always felt himself to be, Steven could feel that as clearly as if a garden gate had clicked open, and were waiting to be closed.
And now? What completion could there be? What could fill the great absence that Frank had left behind him? What could follow that passionate outpouring of love and desire, so pent up for so long?
He walked out into the hall again, stood listening. He could not hear the murmur of Margot’s and Diana’s voices, but he knew that they must be up there, in a bedroom with the door shut tight.
A tiny sound behind him: he turned to see the dog walking slowly through the porch, dazed with heat and sleep.
‘Come on, boy.’
Together they walked down the long cool passage to the kitchen, where he drank and drank from the stone sink tap, then pulled out a chair and sat waiting, the dog at his feet. And because they were right at the back of the house, at some distance from the garden, he couldn’t hear the footsteps of a broken man walking fast and deliberately back up the lawn and towards the pele tower, nor the creaking open of the old oak door. But he did hear it slam behind him, and then, after a frowning few moments, the echoing, unmistakable blast of a gun.
6
Afternoon sun spread in the deepest tranquillity over the grounds of Great Whitton. The parkland bordering the avenue of beech, the reed-fringed lake, the island: all were bathed in mellow light. Deer rested in the shade. In the boat house, the dinghies lay side by side on the dappled water. In the fields beyond, and up on the hills, sheep grazed unceasingly beneath the summer sky. It was all as it had ever been.
Inside the house, beyond the cream-painted double doors which opened off the hall, a little group of people were setting up music stands before a grand piano.
A stranger arriving now might at first glance have thought simply: preparations for a country-house concert: how charming. Three young musicians: how delightful. Had such a stranger crossed that serenely sunlit hall and walked further into the room – so spacious, so airy, with its plasterwork ceiling, long windows at the back overlooking a terrace; had he sat down on one of the elegant little hired chairs set out in rows, he would have seen that each of the musicians was as pale as the scores opened out upon the stands, as the ivory of the piano keys. He would have seen that they moved very slowly, as if in shock, and barely spoke, and soon he might have guessed that something had happened, something had marked them indelibly, so much so that it was extraordinary that they should now, in silence, get out a violin, a cello, go to the piano, sit down, and prepare, in rehearsal, to play.
Steven, who was anything but a stranger, saw all this.
They were tuning up. Haydn, they’d decided, should open the programme: something formal and calming, before the great emotion of Beethoven, and the Ghost. Steven knew neither piece, had heard only snatches in rehearsal, but as he took a seat – near the back, to test the acoustic, as George had asked him to do – he wondered, indeed, that the Trio could even contemplate this concert. Surely it could be, should be, cancelled. The merest weeks had passed: everyone, unquestionably, would understand.
But then, as they looked at one another – that infinitesimal glance of accord – and began to play, he closed his eyes and saw not the horrible, relentless re-running of the past few weeks, but himself in a snowy playground, eighteen months ago, walking towards the gates at the end of the afternoon.
‘Sir! Sir, you forgot this!’
Johnny Mather, missing an icy patch and racing after him with his textbook.
‘Wouldn’t have been able to do your marking, would you, sir?’
‘Thanks, Mather.’
Barely a week since the funeral – the freezing Cawbeck churchyard, that terrible descent onto snow-speckled earth – and he had gone back to teaching.
‘Stop a moment.’ George was tapping his bow, and Steven opened his eyes. ‘Can we do those last six bars again? Diana, I can’t really hear you.’
‘Sorry.’ They began again. And now he could hear and see, as they repeated that last little passage, that Diana’s playing was stronger, and more confident: she was recovering herself a little, getting into her stride. This, after all, was her home: she had spent years practising here.
Had Frank come to listen to her scales, her going over and over the cello part alone?
My sister and a couple of friends play in a trio – I’d love you to come and
hear them . . .
Why? Why would Frank love that? Had he just been taking pity on him in his loneliness and grief? Perhaps: kindness coursed through every cell in his body. Yet to introduce him to the woman whom Steven now knew he had loved unrequitedly all his life – had he guessed what might happen? Even wanted it? Had he, in the ultimate sacrifice, simply wanted her to be happy?
But then, as Diana bent low over the cello, drawing the bow across with sudden energy, it came to him.
Not Margot. Not Margot at all.
‘This is my sister, Diana . . .’
A rain-swept autumn night, a concert, interval drinks. A beautiful, unattached sister: had it really been she whom Frank wanted him to meet? Had he honestly thought that a young woman of such a background, such head-turning loveliness, might be interested in a shy, bereaved teacher from a local school? If so, thought Steven, he must have seen something in me that I cannot see myself.
The piano stopped abruptly. Now it was Margot wanting to try a passage once again. ‘I just can’t seem to get it right. Can we go from Bar 34?’
Oh, how pale she was – paper-white, and thin. Much too thin. And as they ran through again, and then again, Steven stretched his legs out beneath the chair in front, closed his eyes once more on all that frailty, and waited for everything – yet again – to well up before him. That baking afternoon, Diana flying over the grass in tears, the tall dark figure beneath the trees: a man who for decades had longed and longed in secret, who had finally spoken, and been most consummately rejected. He heard the slam of the pele tower door, saw the dog’s head jerk up. Animals know before humans when something is wrong, or about to happen – had Steven himself guessed, in those uneasy few moments, what Heslop was about to do?
‘My father keeps his guns in there . . .’
‘And Barrow keeps his barrow . . .’
They had laughed, walking over the flagstones on a cold March afternoon, the light beginning to go, the air smelling of freshly-dug earth and smoke; he had wanted to put her arm through his. Had he begun to love her then?
