Summer Half: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC)

by Angela Thirkell

  ‘What has happened? I can’t hear a word you say,’ said matron, coming downstairs. ‘Don’t make all that noise, boys, there’s no need to wake the upper dormitory too. What is it, Mr Carter?’

  ‘I can’t make out yet,’ said Mr Carter. ‘Hacker seems to have broken his spectacles, but why his room should be on fire I don’t know. Anyway, it’s out now. You’d better all go back to bed. You too, Hacker. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Please, sir,’ said Swan, ‘there’s a flood coming out of the bathroom.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Mr Carter angrily.

  Swan and Morland, encouraging each other with soldierly words of command, made for the bathroom door and flung it open. A delightful scene of horror met their eyes. The bath was overflowing and had evidently been overflowing for some time. Sponges, soap, socks, towels, and a sodden volume of Aeschylus were swept into the passage. The lower dormitory got entirely out of hand and matron had to retreat three steps upstairs.

  ‘It’s all right now, sir,’ said Swan, emerging wet-legged from the bathroom. ‘Someone had left the tap running.’

  ‘Aeschylus!’ said Mr Carter, picking up the sodden book. ‘And why Aeschylus in the bathroom? Hacker, can you explain this?’

  ‘It was my chameleon, sir,’ said Hacker.

  ‘Good God, boy!’ cried Mr Carter, ‘don’t tell me that your wretched animal set fire to your cubicle and flooded the bathroom.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the miserable Hacker.

  ‘If that’s all you learn in the Classical Sixth,’ said Mr Carter, ‘you’d better go over to the modern side. Didn’t you all hear me tell you to go to bed,’ he said, suddenly turning upon the lower dormitory.

  ‘Some of them have got wet feet, Mr Carter,’ said matron.

  ‘They would. Winter, you and Keith send the dry boys straight to bed. Matron, will you deal with the wet ones. And, Winter, stop the dry ones from paddling in the wet. Where’s Swan?’

  ‘He went down to see if everything was all right in the kitchen, sir,’ said Morland. ‘It’s just under the bathroom, and we thought some of the wet might have got through.’

  Even as he spoke Swan came hotfoot upstairs with the agreeable news that a great patch of the kitchen ceiling had fallen down onto the gas oven and water was still dripping from above. Matron, who had seen the lower dormitory into their beds, now came out again, full of zeal, seeking whom she might devour, and began to harass Swan and Morland till they put on dry pyjamas and got into bed. Hacker, who had rescued his book, found his spare spectacles, put the chameleon back in its place, and got into bed, full of an inarticulate grievance against the fate that wouldn’t let one read Aeschylus in peace without bringing flood and fire to ruin one’s evening, and with but little hope of impressing his doctrine of Predestination upon an unsympathetic housemaster.

  ‘Of course tomorrow would be Sunday,’ said Mr Carter to his lieutenants before they separated. ‘We’ll have to cadge meals for the whole house tomorrow. If Hacker weren’t working for a scholarship I’d skin him. I’ll have to speak to Lorimer about a suitable punishment that won’t upset his work.’

  Sunday was a little flat after the excitement of the previous night. Matron had been down early and told the cook and the maids the news, adding that the kitchen would have to be cleaned, and there would be no lunch, and only a cold supper. Mr Carter went over to the Head’s house directly after breakfast and told him of the damage, which, with a good housemaster’s loyalty, he attributed entirely to Hacker’s having lost his spectacles. Mr Birkett asked him to come over to supper with one of his junior masters and a couple of senior boys, and arranged for the house to be boarded out for lunch.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said Mr Carter, ‘I’ll stay in the house and send Winter and Keith over to you with a couple of prefects. I think matron will be glad of my support.’

  ‘I remember much the same thing happening in the junior school when I first went there,’ said Mr Birkett, ‘only in that case I left the tap on myself.’

  Mr Carter then returned to his house and interviewed Hacker, who after lengthy cross-questioning managed to describe the events of the night before.

  ‘Well,’ said his housemaster, ‘next time you will know that if you tie a powerful electric bulb up in a handkerchief, you will probably be burned to death. I suppose I ought to confiscate your chameleon.’

  ‘Oh, sir!’ said Hacker, aghast.

  ‘But I shan’t,’ said Mr Carter, ‘because the wretched thing would die on my hands. But a reading-lamp in your room I now forbid. You can get your reading done at the proper time or not at all.’

  ‘But, sir – Mr Lorimer —’

  ‘If Mr Lorimer can’t put sense into your head, it’s time someone did,’ said Mr Carter. ‘You can’t even tell a plain narrative of what happened. I’d better ask Mr Lorimer to put you back onto Caesar. He would have given, at once, a clear and concise account of what had occurred, in oratio obliqua. Go and find Mr Lorimer and ask if he can see me.’

  The ensuing interview began as a pitched battle between Senior Classics and Housemastering. Mr Lorimer, a middle-aged man with the gait and appearance of a tortoise and an uncanny gift for forcing his pupils into scholarships, criticised with venomous precision the discipline which allowed his favourite for the Montgomery Scholarship to be first burned and then drowned. Mr Carter pointed out that the classics appeared to be no preparation for life, in that they did not, so far as he could see, even train a boy to think. Any child from an elementary school would, he said, have been able to give a clearer account of what had occurred than the head of the Classical Sixth. They then both lost interest in Hacker, and Mr Lorimer gave Mr Carter some of his excellent sherry, while Mr Carter gave some friendly criticism of Mr Lorimer’s translation into Greek verse of the new rules about the bathing pool.

  ‘Sorry you can’t stay,’ said Mr Lorimer. ‘I’ve got to get Hacker through this scholarship. After that you can crucify him if you like.’

  ‘What about this reading he does after lights out?’ asked Mr Carter.

  ‘Stop it, Carter, stop it. He’ll be stale in another week if he goes on. How I loathe boys and their ways,’ said Mr Lorimer, who had been teaching for thirty-five years and took promising boys to his home in Scotland every holidays.

  ‘About mid-term I could kill every boy in my house with joy,’ said Mr Carter, who liked being a housemaster more than anything in the world, and usually enlivened the tedium of the holidays by taking boys to Finland, or Mount Athos.

  Mr Lorimer then metaphorically tucked up his wristbands, fell upon Hacker, and made him write the history of the fire and flood in Greek and Latin prose and verse, in the manner of the most eminent stylists of both languages, and later in the term Hacker got the Montgomery Open Scholarship for Lazarus College with no difficulty at all. The incident was soon forgotten, but if it had not been for Hacker’s misfortune, Philip Winter and Colin Keith, with Swan and Morland, would not have been invited simultaneously to the headmaster’s house for Sunday supper, and the Whitsuntide holidays might have been quite different.

  Just as Colin was starting Mr Carter called him into his study to give him a message for the Head.

  ‘By the way, sir,’ said Colin, ‘my people asked me to bring anyone I liked home for Whitsun. I don’t know if you are fixed up. If not, would you feel like coming? I can offer you two parents, two sisters, a garden with tennis, a river, and church on Sunday entirely optional.’

  Mr Carter said he had been leaving the Whitsun holidays to chance, and would be delighted to accept the Keiths’ kind invitation.

  In the school quad Colin overtook Swan and Morland, clean and serious, on their way to the headmaster’s house. As they had been discussing his chances against Rose Birkett, his presence froze their flow of talk, and the courtesy with which they endeavoured to find a subject suitable for a master’s intellect was of a paralysing nature. Luckily for all three Simnet was on the watch, and opened the front door
as they came up the steps.

  ‘Good evening, Simnet,’ said Colin.

  ‘Good evening to you, sir,’ said Simnet. ‘This is quite like old times, if I may say so, sir. And if I may venture to mention it, sir, the headmaster has a Madeira which he will offer to you during the evening meal, as good as what the Honourable Mr Norris used to have. He got it from the College Cellars, sir, and I have made a Special Study of it. There will be cider for the young gentlemen, sir.’

  Swan and Morland looked at each other with real awe. Mr Keith, the tenderfoot of the house, a master whom they were treating with courtesy and no more, was on intimate terms with Simnet, a man compared with whom the Head himself, as was well known, was as naught. In this emotional moment, even the insult about the cider was forgotten, and each boy looked at Colin’s back, preceding them into the drawing-room, with something approaching reverence.

  Mrs Birkett was alone. Mr Birkett, she explained, had been for a long tramp, and would join them in a moment. Swan and Morland dematerialised, and suddenly reappeared at the far end of the room, absorbed in books. Mrs Birkett gave Colin some sherry and talked very comfortably to him till her husband came in with the School Chaplain, Mr Smith. As Mr Birkett had already met Colin twice that day, once after chapel and once by bumping into him by mistake round the wall of the fives-court, he greeted his assistant master with a kind of salute, and said, ‘Ha, Keith!’

  Colin wanted to reply, ‘Ha, sir!’, but feeling that this would be disrespectful he merely said, ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is evening,’ said Mr Birkett. ‘The line of demarcation between afternoon and evening is curiously difficult to define. Smith, you know Keith, who is taking the Mixed Fifth. His father does a lot of the cathedral business in Barchester. And now that summer time is upon us, it is more difficult still.’

  ‘Of course one has to remember that it is really only half-past six,’ said Mrs Birkett and Mr Smith together.

  ‘We had frightful difficulty over summer time this year,’ said Colin, ‘because no one could remember which way the clocks ought to go.’

  He had only meant this remark to be a contribution to general conversation, but to his embarrassment, everyone looked expectant.

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Mrs Birkett.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Colin. ‘I mean the kitchen clock had been put on in the right direction, so by breakfast time it was all right.’

  ‘Watch, for ye know not the hour,’ said Mr Smith, clapping Colin on the back in a friendly way, and laughing.

  ‘I always wonder what good watching would do,’ said Mrs Birkett, ‘because if you didn’t know the hour, no amount of watching would be any help.’

  ‘It’s like looking for the Pole Star if you are lost,’ said Colin. ‘It’s all very well to know where the north is, but if you don’t know where you are, you can’t tell which way to go, and the north is no more use than the south.’

  ‘Excuse me, madam,’ said Simnet, ‘I suppose you did not intend to wait for Miss Rose?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Birkett.

  ‘Pardon me, madam,’ said Simnet, whose method of showing his resentment at being interfered with by his master was to ignore him altogether, ‘but as Miss Rose has gone out with Mr Winter in his Blue Sports Car, I thought you might wish to be assured of her safe return before commencing dinner.’

  ‘Isn’t Rose back then?’ asked Mr Birkett.

  ‘No, dear,’ said Mrs Birkett, finding herself, rather to her annoyance, reduced to acting as interpreter between her husband and her butler, ‘she went out with Philip in his car, but I expect they’ll be back any moment now.’

  ‘We’ll wait for a few minutes then,’ said Mr Birkett.

  Simnet remained aloof and impassive.

  ‘Pardon me, madam,’ he said, ‘but will you wait till Miss Rose and Mr Winter is come back, or shall I use My Own Discretion as to the serving up of Dinner?’

  ‘I’ll ring as soon as we are ready, Simnet,’ said Mr Birkett, thus winning this particular round. ‘But I wish,’ he added as Simnet left the room, ‘that Rose and Philip would remember to be in time for meals. It has been the same every Sunday. Well, Eric and Tony, what have you found?’

  The boys laid down the books they had been looking at and came into the front drawing-room.

  ‘That’s a good book you have on Van Gogh, sir,’ said Swan, ‘but there’s a new Viennese one that’s even better. You ought to get it.’

  ‘It’s from the same publisher that did that lovely book of reproductions of details of pictures of Vittorio da Mantua,’ said Morland.

  ‘Too many “of’s”, Tony,’ said Swan.

  ‘Say it yourself then,’ said Morland without heat. ‘Do you know it, sir?’ he continued, kindly bringing Colin into the conversation.

  Colin, feeling gross and ignorant, said he didn’t, and further admitted that the painter’s name was unknown to him. Morland obligingly gave him a list of the few known paintings of that delightful but obscure artist, while the Chaplain conversed with Swan on Van Gogh. Just as Swan was politely explaining to Mr Smith that Van Gogh and Gauguin were separate persons, the Blue Sports Car rushed up to the door, checked and halted. In a moment Rose, untidy and lovely, was in the room, leading Philip by the hand.

  ‘Finished dinner, darlings?’ she said, taking a comb from Philip’s pocket and passing it through her hair.

  ‘We were waiting for you and Philip, Rose,’ said her mother. ‘Eric, would you ring the bell.’

  ‘Sorry, darling, but why on earth?’ said Rose, flinging her coat and scarf onto a chair. ‘Philip and I had a marvellous time.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Philip, ‘I really am. We went a bit farther than we meant and didn’t see what time it was, and anyway I hadn’t my watch and Rose’s had gone mad.’

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said Mr Birkett. ‘Dinner ready, Simnet? Come in, everyone, without ceremony.’

  Against the deadly ritual of Sunday supper Mrs Birkett had steadfastly set her face for the whole of her married life, and this alone was enough to distinguish her among wives, not to speak of headmasters’ wives. In early days she had cooked hot food herself.

  As her husband rose in his profession and they both inherited legacies from uncles and aunts, she had been able to afford a kitchen-maid, so Mr Birkett had not for nearly twenty years known what cold beef, sardines, potato salad, tinned peaches and blancmange (all in themselves, except perhaps the last, excellent and wholesome food) could represent in the way of Sabbath horror. Invitation to Sunday supper was hoped for with frank greed by the school staff and the senior boys, but even Mrs Birkett’s hospitality could not seat more than five or six guests at most, and of these some were necessarily apt to be guests from outside the school. It was therefore a piece of luck for Colin that he was taking Mr Carter’s place so early in the term.

  Philip’s position in the matter of Sunday suppers was very uncertain. As the future husband of the Birketts’ elder daughter he had an obvious right to sup with them as often as they, or Rose without consulting her parents, chose to invite him, but as an assistant master his rights were doubtful. A careful calculation made in the common room under the supervision of the Senior Mathematical Master showed that Philip’s chances were approximately 2.734 per term, and his excess visits to the Head’s house already about 500 per cent above the average or mean. Of this situation Philip was uncomfortably aware, and would have been glad to retire from Sunday evenings, but his overpowering love for Rose made it impossible for him to refuse her prayers. On the one occasion when he had made a determined effort to avoid the difficulty, Rose had first begged, then sulked, then burst into tears. Philip, fearing for her reason, nay for her life, had desperately and with loving words tried to explain his position and soothe her wrath, but Rose, who had not troubled to listen to a word he said, cried more loudly than ever, and taking a china pig that she had stopped caring for, threw it right across the room. After this proof of d
evotion there was no course open to a man of honour but to promise to come to supper as often as her parents invited him. Rose, her lovely blue eyes swimming in tears, said in a choked voice that if Philip liked her parents better than her, he had better marry them, and so the episode closed, leaving Philip more madly in love than ever, but none the less sensitive about the Sunday evenings.

  Rose Birkett, hanging affectionately on the Chaplain’s arm and dragging Philip with her disengaged hand, placed herself between them at table. Mrs Birkett left the rest of her party to sort itself, with the result that Colin found himself between his hostess and Swan, facing Rose.

  Mr Smith made the slight preliminary clearance of the throat which is part of a chaplain’s duty.