Jill

by Philip Larkin

  “What was the matter with his navel?” grinned Christopher, buttoning his scarf inside his jacket. “Here, finish that beer, Eddy, you bloody pig.”

  “I only wanted to see if the bitter was still the same old Bull’s piss. I can’t think why you don’t have mild.”

  “Jesus!” said Christopher disgustedly. “Leave it then. Here, oh damn, I’ve got no real money. Can you see me through, Eddy?” His hand searched his pockets sketchily. “A quid will do.”

  “No can do,” said the other young man. Eddy opened his pocket-book, a cutting about a horse his father owned fluttering to the ground. John silently picked it up. “Sorry, Chris, I’ve only fifteen bob till I go to the bank. Get it off Pat.”

  “I owe Pat two quid,” grumbled Christopher. “You haven’t a quid handy, have you, John, old man?”

  “Why, of course.”

  John felt in his pockets. Rather belatedly, Christopher said:

  “John Kemp—Dick Dowdall.”

  John smiled uneasily, trying as he handed the note over to catch Christopher’s eye to seal the loan with a friendly glance, but Christopher was looking at the money.

  “That’s white of you, old man. You’ll get it back tomorrow without fail. Right, let’s go.”

  They pushed out of the bar, calling good night to the landlord and leaving the half-empty glass standing on the bar. A soldier grunted and said something sarcastic to his comrade. John heard Eddy’s high laugh in the alleyway outside—why did he laugh?

  Frowning, tasting his beer reluctantly, he went over the conversation as with a small hammer, tapping and assessing every word. Perhaps it had not been too bad, for a start. He thought about it until he noticed the time shown by the bar clock, which alarmed him and made him leave hurriedly to get back in time for dinner. He did not know it would be fast.

  During dinner he thought constantly of the pound: it was the second of the five pounds pocket-money he had to last him through the term and should have covered the coming fortnight. Now he could not help feeling as uneasy about it as if he had used it to back a racehorse. He told himself that Christopher would pay it back out of sheer courtesy, but even so his mind was not at rest. He avoided sitting by Whitbread.

  To comfort himself, he ordered another half of bitter, and when he had returned to his rooms he found himself too drowsy to concentrate on the work he had intended doing. Even though he took out his sheaf of notes and unscrewed his fountain pen, his mind wandered. In the grate the servant had constructed an enormous fire that was just reaching its best: the heat thrilled and stupefied him; he turned over a few pages, wondering where Christopher was at that moment. Some of the notes he had made yesterday, others dated from several years ago. He tried to remember when he had written them, and failed.

  He had not noticed the precise date when Mr. Joseph Crouch had been appointed to the staff of the Huddlesford Grammar School as English master, and at the time knew nothing about him. Joseph Crouch was a young man with an excellent London University degree. Indeed, his ability was such that he was put in charge of all senior English work within a few months, and the other English master could only shrug his shoulders more or less philosophically. Mr. Crouch was very pleased about this. He found some comfortable rooms on the edge of the park, and transported at some expense all his books and bookshelves thence from his home in Watford. There were hundreds of volumes: not expensive, but there was some sort of a copy of every important work in the language, and many works of criticism, all with “Joseph Crouch” scribbled carelessly in soft pencil on the fly-leaf. Passages he approved of had a straight pencil-stroke by them: those he disliked were marked with a wavy line: without exception the books bore traces of having been exhaustively and intelligently studied.

  He also brought a suitcase full of his University notes, which in themselves explained his academic success. They covered every book he had read in one way or another, giving synopsis of the plot, the argument, the style and the book’s history; they were written in black ink on single sides of thin sheets of paper, and the headings were underlined in red. Scraps of supplementary information had in some cases been pasted in; all were frequently studded with cross-references and these were in green; the sheets were held together with brass pins. They were numbered carefully, each figure with a little circle round it, and the handwriting on the first sheet was not in the slightest way different from the handwriting on the last one. They filled one of the drawers of his writing desk.

  Mr. Crouch was not a good-looking man. He was rather short, with a sallow, yellowish skin, untidy hair and features of a slightly Mongolian cast. When he smiled, his face split into a malevolent crease, and though he was young, his walk recalled an old man’s shuffle; he wore a pair of thick-lensed spectacles. His teaching was unusual in that he delivered complete, rather formal sentences in a measured voice; the boys, accustomed to the colloquial and even incoherent manner of the rest of the staff, found him hard to attend to, and the word went round “Joe’s dull”. This made him less popular than if the verdict had been that he was “a real swine”.

  All the same, he was pleased with himself. Huddlesford Grammar School was large and of a fairly high standing, and he regarded his post there as nothing but a stepping-stone to better things. He liked his rooms, and after tea would sit placidly in the armchair before the fire correcting work, reading intelligent books or magazines, or translating (for his own amusement) poems he liked from other languages. At intervals he would sit, dreamily watching the gas fire, thinking how, when his salary had risen, he would indulge himself in luxuries his means had so far denied him—expensive clothes, cigars, new books. Surprisingly, his nature had a sensual streak that longed for idleness and freedom. And because everything he had worked for he had so far won, he looked forward to this future with expectancy, almost with satisfaction. He felt like a man who has finished his first course of a meal, found it excellent, and has a keen appetite for what is to follow.

  His only discontent in the present was that his work was not exacting enough. It was humiliating, he found, to deal with boys who had not the slightest understanding of his subject: humiliating when the discussion of an essay resolved into a discussion of its handwriting, its brevity, or even its non-existence. Too often it was borne in upon him that his work as a schoolmaster ended at a point below that at which his work as a graduate began, and that the standard of appreciation he was forced to deal with fell below any but the coarsest contempt.

  “Well, it’s the old story, of course,” said the junior science master, a pleasant, disillusioned young man to whom Crouch had taken a fancy. “I don’t see that you can do anything. If you wanted to do advanced teaching, why didn’t you try for a university job?”

  “Ah! Why didn’t I?” Mr. Crouch was not to be drawn into a discussion of his private affairs.

  “It wears off. For instance, I didn’t exactly need a Cambridge degree to teach fourteen-year-olds the difference between an ohm and a watt.”

  “No,” said Mr. Crouch. Bunches of boys swung past on bicycles (they were both walking home after school) trying to ride on the right side of the road and to lower their voices momentarily.

  “After all, you’re senior man in your subject here—you can train people for university work, if you want. I’m only allowed to tamper with the junior intelligence.”

  Mr. Crouch raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes. That would be a good idea.”

  “Is anyone in the sixth specializing in English this year?”

  “Jarrett is, odious creature. I’m afraid it’s quite hopeless thinking about him. Still, it’s a point worth keeping in mind.”

  Mr. Crouch nodded a thoughtful farewell, and turned down the avenue that led him home.

  He was pleased to find his landlady had boiled him an egg for tea and that there was a new cherry cake. Not till he had satisfied his appetite and was smoking a cigarette did he reconsider the idea, but when he did it seemed more and more attractive. If he could catch
a boy in the present fifth form, for instance, and encourage and develop his talents; if he could act the role of a tutor, lending him his dusty little texts and meticulous notes, by judicious suggestion and direction of his reading bringing the whole of literature within the range of the boy’s mind.… How tired he was of expurgated copies of Macbeth and The Golden Treasury. How he longed to ascend once more to the remoter plains, to talk of Marlowe and Norse literature, to draw sweeping parallels and make irrefutable assertions.

  Picking up the empty eggshell that his spoon had scoured clean, he gazed at it solemnly. What should he do? Should he indulge this fancy? He sat grinning, increasing the pressure of his thumb and forefinger, until with a sudden smash the shell collapsed.

  It was unfortunate that his first choice fell upon a bright fifth-former whose conduct was troublesome and whose literary style was racy and impressive. “William Wordsworth”, Mr. Crouch read, “drew back appalled as heads that had smiled in London drawing-rooms rolled in clotted Parisian sawdust.” Undeterred, he made a few private inquiries about the boy’s future intentions, and received nebulous and slightly impertinent replies. The boy finally left after taking his School Certificate to become a junior reporter on the local paper. On the last day of term, he contrived to pin one end of a roll of toilet paper to Mr. Crouch’s gown, and Mr. Crouch shuffled the whole length of a corridor before finding out.

  It took the whole of the summer holidays to reconcile him again to his original idea. During this time, he had returned to his home, spent much time in London with old friends from college and elsewhere, and lived for a fortnight in a cottage in the Lake District, where he had ironically read nothing but William Wordsworth. Everyone had congratulated him on his quick promotion, and one or two had specifically mentioned the opportunities it provided for training advanced students. As soon as the grammar school settled down at the beginning of the autumn term, he decided to make a second attempt.

  Accordingly he collected the essays of the new School Certificate form as he was teaching and took them home one evening, and as soon as his landlady had cleared the table he put the pile of exercise books on the table, opened a packet of cigarettes and sat down. The essay had been on “The Supernatural in Macbeth”. His intention was to read each essay through and mark it without looking at the name on the cover of the book: he would select the most attractive of the essays and investigate its author. The idea of being a judge gave him childish pleasure.

  He sat there all evening, light from the shaded lamp falling on to the straggling, wispy hair and a little ashtray at his elbow collecting cigarette ends. Occasionally he scrawled a neat; acid comment on the margin; occasionally he grinned or raised his eyebrows. The task was not greatly interesting, for thirty boys with identical resources and knowledge produce thirty very similar essays. Four were of a fairly high standard of competence, and these he laid aside to return to later; the rest received marks from thirteen to three out of twenty, and a variety of calculated insults.

  One sentence in one of the four essays made him pause. It ran: Macbeth does not feel remorse, for he does not feel he has done wrong; evil is embodied in the witches, and he is not as bad as they are.

  He gave his attention to that essay and read it slowly through once more. At the end, he had to admit it was the best of the lot—not outstandingly so: it was not a brilliant essay, but that was not to be expected. It was not exactly original, but nor was that. Its great virtue was one of extreme efficiency. The boy knew the play and could quote appropriately from it; he knew the introduction and could paraphrase that. The style was not excessively immature, and the unfamiliar handwriting was neat. And the sentence that arrested his attention was like a fancied streak of light in the sky before dawn: perhaps it was imagination, or the sun might be near.

  With sudden decision, he snapped the book shut to read the name on the cover.

  J. Kemp.

  Kemp?

  For a moment he frowned, quite at a loss. A pale boy in a corner? Kemp?

  Momentary annoyance possessed him, but faded quickly as he realized he was glad that it was someone unknown to him. There were boys he could think of who would have been great disappointments.

  He stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the hearthrug. Kemp. A pale boy in a corner, with fair hair. Never spoke unless he was spoken to—sometimes not even then. Pulling his mark book across the table, he opened it to find that Kemp had won three reasonably high marks from him during the three weeks they had been back at school. This surprised him. He began to feel quite curious about the boy and was delighted at the result of his private examination.

  “What do I know about Kemp?” repeated the language master next day. “Mousy.”

  “Is that all?”

  “He comes fairly high up most times. Why?”

  “I was wondering,” said Mr. Crouch pleasantly, and moved away.

  “A quiet lad—gives no trouble, no trouble at all,” said the history master, who asked no more of any boy if he gave no trouble.

  “Would you say he was intelligent?”

  “Oh, quite—yes, quite. A very good standard of work. It’s just that one doesn’t notice him much,” he ended with a nervous smile.

  “I’ve noticed him,” said Mr. Crouch.

  “Kemp?’ boomed the mathematics master, an enormous beaky-nosed caricature of a man, whose suit was eternally covered with chalk dust. He had been at the school nearly thirty years. “Why, yes. A very good all-round intelligence, there. Picks up knowledge like a magnet picks up iron filings. His father’s a policeman, I think—or was. I know they aren’t well off.”

  Mr. Crouch thank him politely and shuffled off to his classroom.

  When he took that particular form, it was the last period of the day, and the lights were on. Outside cars and lorries ploughed through the rain along the road that ran some distance from the school buildings. Mr. Crouch set them some parsing to do, and then called them up in turn to give back their essays: many just received them with a word of praise or blame: others he kept while he expounded some point they had raised or settled some issue they had imperfectly handled. Deliberately he allowed half an hour to go by. But at last he locked his yellow hands before him, surveyed the rows of bent heads and said in a harsh voice:

  “Kemp.”

  There was a movement at the back of the room, and the boy came up between the desks.

  “I like this essay, Kemp,” Mr. Crouch began, not bothering to open the book. “It showed care, thought and good sense.” He paused. “You’re a pretty hard worker, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Mr. Crouch surveyed him speculatively. He was thin and pale and poorly dressed; his eyes glanced nervously up and then fell again; his hands were held behind him. It was difficult to imagine an expression of happiness on his face. Only his silky hair, like pale thistle-seed, was agreeable to look at.

  “I’ve heard that you are.” Mr. Crouch began to play with his silver propelling pencil, slipping his thumb-nail under the clip. “What are your plans for the future?”

  “When I leave school, sir?”

  “Are you going to leave? This year, I mean?”

  “I suppose so, yes, sir.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  “No ideas at all?”

  “I suppose I shall go into some sort of office, sir.”

  Mr. Crouch grinned.

  “Ever thought of staying on into the sixth form and taking a university scholarship?”

  Kemp stared at him for a moment with frightened blue eyes.

  “No, sir.”

  “I see no reason why you shouldn’t think about it. You’re on a scholarship here, aren’t you? Well, it’s only the next step. You’ll get a pretty good School Certificate by all accounts, and if you stay on another two years with a Sixth Form scholarship you’ll get a pretty good Higher School Certificate. Then you can spend a year collecting scholarshi
ps for the university—Oxford, Cambridge, London, whatever you like.”

  He paused, but the boy made no comment.

  “When you get to the university, you’ll get a good degree—and make a lot of very useful contacts. Then you can start thinking about getting a job in some sort of office.” He held the silver pencil by the tips of his forefingers. “How does the idea strike you?”

  The boy’s glance fell away towards the ground again and his mouth tightened. He looked bewildered.

  “Well?”

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  Mr. Crouch was not displeased with the boy’s unresponsiveness: it made the idea all the more fascinating. Like a sculptor, he would mould passivity.

  “You see, I think you could specialize in English very satisfactorily. If we began to work together now, I could over a period of three years, say, tutor you up to university standard easily. In my opinion, you’d walk away with a university scholarship. Perhaps you think that sounds a tall order,” added Mr. Crouch maliciously, noting the dismayed look. “I can assure you it isn’t as tall as it looks.”

  The boy raised his hand to his mouth nervously. His wrists were red and his nails bitten.

  “What would your father’s reactions to the idea be?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Will you ask him? You see, I don’t anticipate any difficulty about the financial side of it. The governors would give you a grant easily enough. I don’t think there’s any call for you to run off into some sort of an office just yet.”

  The boy blushed.

  “Well, think it over, and mention it to your father; I’d like to talk to him about it, if he could see me some time. Will you do that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then. Here, take your book,” he added.

  He watched the boy return to his seat and sit down with his hand hiding his face. The faint hum of the classroom as the industrious worked and the idlers idled came suddenly to his ears, and he brought the flat of his hand down with a sharp smack on the desk.