In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  “We won’t get caught, will we? I mean it’s absolutely dead against the rules, even more sinful than going into a college.”

  “Good Lord no! That’s exactly why I’m taking you there instead of the Mitre, the Ploughman, the Tenth Folly or the—” Michael checked himself. “In the Carpenter’s one never meets anyone who is in the least likely to know one in the social sense; and in any case, John, I shouldn’t worry too much about the School rules if I were you; from what you tell me of your little causerie with Rudmose you won’t be there very much longer, and frankly I think it’s a good thing.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  Perhaps he had been unjust in his attitude to Mick, perhaps he was not after all so undiscerning as he had thought. He warmed to him. “It’s awfully decent of you to be so sympathetic.”

  “Think nothing of it!”

  “I’ve never said much about it at home, perhaps because of Mother’s rule that once it was all over any discussion of the Moors thing was forbidden. But honestly Mick I’ve loathed the place from the very beginning—” his voice trailed off, he swallowed and resumed. “She discusses it of course; you know, in her bedroom at night when she thinks I’m moodier than usual, ‘haunted’ as she calls it. I think it’s very sweet of her to go on trying to help me, but with the rest of the family the rule is still in force; even though we’re all supposed to be praying for—Victoria and Mrs Blount. I’m pretty sure she discusses it with everyone including Betty Cae Ficer, but for some reason, I’m not supposed to talk about it to anyone except her.” They walked on a few paces. “When you were up with us last Vac did she say anything about it to you?”

  Beside him Michael’s face lengthened. “Look here old chap! I really think it would be better if we buried the bone. I think Mother does know best about this. Myself, I always found her advice very reliable when I was in my ‘teens, though of course when one begins life at Oxford or Cambridge one has to give a little credence to one’s amour propre.”

  When Michael resorted to French, as he did increasingly these days, and when in addition his features assumed the old and familiar lugubriousness for which he had always been marked, it was useless to argue or wheedle. John changed his approach.

  “You’re probably right,” he said, “but if you really see how I feel, you know—worse even than your Lancing days, perhaps you’ll back me up with Mother and Father over the Rudmose idea of starting afresh with this tutor friend of his in Worthing or wherever it is?”

  A little impatiently Michael changed his black floppy umbrella from one hand to the other.

  “Of course I shall.” His spectacles were directed at the pavement. “It would be far the best thing. In my opinion it was madness, a sort of ‘insanity à deux’ on their part, ever to send you to Oxford in the first place; so embarrassing for—everyone, myself included! Of course, I told them both that I was quite prepared to do my bit and shepherd you through the first rather unpleasant months, and I think that on the whole we have managed to keep in touch and that I may have succeeded in tempering the wind a little. Even so, I don’t honestly think I’ve been able to do enough for you to make it really worth while from either of our points of view; I mean, one does get a little sick of people muttering in pubs and in the societies and pointing one out as the brother of the Blaydon Boy. Il faut souffrir, one realises that; but nobody likes to suffer unfruitfully and from your point of view, quite obviously, you ought to be given the chance of escaping the effects of that frightful tabloid publicity.” He quickened his pace as they approached an inn sign on the opposite side of the road. “To summarise, it’s really a question of sauve qui peut, and since for better or worse, I am committed to finishing my course here, I think that your removal, your escape and opportunity, is what we should aim at.”

  Well in step they crossed the road and halted on the pavement beneath the inn sign. Michael flashed him a hot smile through his horn-rimmed spectacles. “Let’s leave it at that, John,” he said, in a brighter, somehow moister, voice. “You just wait here for a moment while I see if it’s all clear inside. It may take me a few minutes, and to fill in the time, you might just scan the pavements and see if you recognise anyone from the School; better take your hat off too, those boaters are so conspicuous.”

  John took it off and fumbled with it. “What shall I do with it?” he asked, feeling suddenly chilled at the thought of Rudmose and Potiphar’s wife.

  Michael snatched it hurriedly.

  “Here, give it to me,” he said. “I’ll deal with it.”

  He turned round, and the next moment he was gone; the little doorway with its frosted glass seemed to have sucked him in like a vacuum cleaner, leaving in his place only the faint warm smell of hops and sawdust. John waited dutifully for about three minutes, and then, beginning to feel obtrusive, walked purposefully across the empty street.

  It was all indefinably and yet typically depressing; just the sort of place Michael would choose, he thought bitterly. Upright little Victorian houses with bulges all over their pillars and bow windows pushing out into minute squares of tiles and grass surrounded by chains, railings, and brick walls.

  People, he thought, always gravitated naturally to their proper surroundings. This was quite obviously Michael’s world; heavily respectable and rectangular outside, hinting at security and a rather frowsty cosiness within, but in reality full of seedy unsympathic people with long serious faces and a fluent excuse for everything they did. He betted that Michael came here often, very often. It was his area, his wall, his tree, a sort of camouflage that blended perfectly with his most prevalent mood. He saw him suddenly as a solemn spectacled caterpillar like the one in Alice, moving carefully on to the shadowed side of his toadstool well away from the bright sunlight.

  The image made him smile, and momentarily he felt more at ease; but a little later it occurred to him sharply that to criticise his own brother like this, even though it were to himself alone, was merely to increase his isolation. Whatever happened he must not cut himself off from the family; if a time came when he could no longer attempt to tell them the things he suffered or enjoyed, if they could not hear, there would be nothing left for him. In addition, he felt sure that there was another factor in his increasing solitariness, that somewhere there was a defect in himself. It was all very well to sneer one’s way through life as he was doing, to have scoffed at the Abbey, to continue to praise Father and condemn Mother, and go on to become an evil judge of persons and start off in the same old way at Beowulf’s; but if it went on, if everyone else were to be measured by the faulty eye and weighed in the biased balance all through the days of his growing-up, there would come a time when there would be no one left but himself, the same crooked and unpleasant self with which he had evidently started. He must love Michael and forgive him seventy times and seven like the man in the Bible, and at last reach the point at which he would understand that there was really nothing to forgive which did not lie within himself.

  He turned and started to walk back towards the Carpenter’s Arms. Yes, he must cling on to Michael at all costs and then Michael would become fonder of him and as he became fonder would become more discerning and more of a help.

  He crossed the road; and as if to reward him for his moment of generosity, Michael’s face, redder, rounder, and more affectionate, suddenly appeared in the brown doorway of the Carpenter’s Arms. He beckoned, and John trotted over to him and into the L-shaped saloon bar. There were only five or six people in there, all of them men, and all of them wearing serge suits of a colour peculiar to the working class, something between bluebell blue and mauve. They all wore white long-pointed collars and striped ties with the exception of the landlord who had a highly polished face and wore nothing save a woollen shirt and a brass front stud in place of collar and tie. They all seemed to know Michael very well indeed; and Michael himself, once he and John were standing comfortably in front of the bar, assumed a quite different manner towards John. He became more openly broth
erly and behaved as though he were very much older and John very much younger than was the fact.

  “My young brother, Mr Cudlopp!” he said to the landlord with a loudness that contrived to make the others party to the announcement. “He’s at Beowulf’s and between ourselves it’s just as well that no one at the school—”

  “I know! I know!” Mr Cudlopp shook with the laughter which, as John later discovered, accompanied even his most prosaic remarks. “Again’ the rules, eh? Don’t you worry, Mr Blaydon! What’s said in the Carpenter’s doesn’t ever go out into the street, especially in a case like this where it could cause a young man more than a red face!” He beamed at John. “If you know what I mean?”

  Playing up, John cringed appropriately. “It certainly could,” he said. “I’ve had two beatings this term already.”

  “Well, what’s it to be?” went on Mr Cudlopp, “another of the same Mr Blaydon? and a nice glass of cyder for your brother?”

  “That would be splendid, and you must join us, Mr Cudlopp.”

  “Thank you sir, thank you.”

  They took their glasses over to a small table beside the screen adjoining the entrance. Michael fumbled comfortably in the pockets of his tweed jacket and produced the pipe Mother had given him for Christmas. He stuffed the bowl carefully with John Cotton’s tobacco and after a certain amount of grunting and patting eventually puffed out a sigh of smoke. “Had a little one while you were keeping cave,” he said quietly, “just to establish the atmosphere and so on. The host here’s a good fellow—great bowls player, but inclined like most of them to be a little hail-fellow-well-met on the slightest provocation. Just as well to have him on our side though; so although I could ill afford it, I thought it would be as well to stand him one, but no doubt you’ll be able to pay me back sometime?” he paused. “I’m not worried about breaking the School rules but I think we should keep on the right side of the licensing laws; when’s your birthday?”

  “March the 25th.”

  “Sixteenth?”

  “No, fourteenth.”

  “Confound it! I told him you were sixteen. Still, never mind! Just remember though, won’t you?”

  “Yes Mick.”

  “How’s the cyder?”

  “Lovely, thanks; but I do hope you’ve got some peppermints. I don’t want anyone to smell my breath when I get back to Beowulf’s.”

  “What time have you to be back?”

  “Not till ten; they’ve given me a late pass.”

  “It will have worn off by then—takes about two hours thirty-five minutes without screening, one hour fifteen with. Whisky of course is different, that’s why I rarely touch it; it doesn’t do to go in to lectures reeking of whisky.”

  “No.”

  They sat on in silence for a time and John noticed that Michael’s attention was tending to stray increasingly in the direction of the shove ha’penny board where two of the purple-suited men were enjoying what was evidently a keen game. He lifted his glass and took a second long pull at his cyder and then waited for its effect. It was not long delayed; the feeling of warmth and lightness began to seep into him from some central point within himself. The air of the bar became sweeter, the bar itself more spacious and better proportioned, and he realised with increasing delight that all the people in it were fundamentally rather pathetic and very lovable. He drained his glass.

  “I think I’ll have another.”

  “What’s that?” Michael jerked his face away from the shove ha’penny battle.

  “Another cyder,” John repeated a little thickly.

  Regarding him sadly, Michael engulfed the remainder of his pint.

  “I wouldn’t just yet old chap. At your age one wants to start the way one means to go on; and it’s a bad thing to get into the habit of taking one’s beer too fast.” He glanced at his watch and got up. “I’ll get you another one in—half an hour. Cyder’s potent stuff, and it’s a pity really that you don’t care for beer because the alcohol-content is about half that of these fermented fruit juices, and incidentally you can’t beat malt and hops as a thirst-quencher, that’s why, on the whole, I’ve made a sort of local rule always to stick to it myself, unless of course I’m in a hurry. By the way, I suppose you have brought a little money with you?”

  John smiled; all at once his thefts seemed extraordinarily, almost painfully, funny. “I haven’t got a penny,” he said. “Not today.”

  Michael frowned. “I thought you were given your pocket-money on Saturdays?”

  “No, on Fridays.”

  “But surely, that was yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” How amusing that he should be angry with him for not having stolen anything lately in the way of money. The money he was spending belonged to Father who’d been left it by his father, who’d made it out of cotton before the Great War. Money was very amusing, particularly in relation to Michael who was looking more solemn than ever as he absorbed the broad smile on John’s face.

  “Do you mean to say you’ve spent the whole lot in twenty-four hours?”

  “You mean the whole two bob? Yes I have, in the tuck-shop yesterday.”

  “Good Lord! What on earth did you spend it on?”

  “Doughnuts and jam puffs—I was hungry. Anyway I don’t think it’s an awful lot when it’s supposed to last a week.”

  “From my point of view I admit that it wouldn’t be a lot. This morning’s already cost me about double that, and by the time I get you back tonight it’ll probably be considerably more! The point is that one’s income is in scale with one’s position and you have spent in a single day the equivalent of my weekly-allowance part of which I’m having to spend on you.

  Within the irrational gaiety which had seized him ever since he had finished his cyder, John tried to feel responsible and penitent.

  “I’m awfully sorry Mick! If I’d known you were going to take me out I’d have kept some of it so’s I could stand you a drink.”

  “It’s not that old chap. It’s just that I feel I ought to remember Mother’s commission and give you a little advice on things of this sort.” Smiling briefly he turned and went over to the bar. “That bitter’s uncommonly sound this morning Mr Cudlopp, I think I’ll try another glass before you change barrels.”

  Mr Cudlopp frothed with laughter as he drew the glass. “Shall I repeat the young gentleman’s too, Mr Blaydon?”

  “Not yet—Oh well, I suppose you might but I don’t think I’m going to let him drink it just yet. He put down that first one in five minutes flat.”

  “Then sir, if you’ll forgive me, he must be a chip off the same block,” said Mr Cudlopp as Michael brought the drinks over to the table.

  “About lunch,” he said; “I don’t suppose you’re very hungry yet, are you? Half-terms, as far as I remember, were usually marked by fairly substantial meals and it’s only two or three hours since your breakfast. In about half an hour, that’s to say at closing time, we’ll be going round to Horab’s rooms. Can you hold out till then?”

  “Who’s Horab?”

  “That Jewish friend of mine at Balliol—you must have heard me mention him. As a matter of fact he’d have been with us now but for the fact that today is Schobbers.”

  “Schobbers?”

  “The Jewish sabbath; starts on Friday, ends with the evening star on Saturday night. Horab has to stay indoors until it’s over; but he always has plenty of food in his rooms; it’s kosher stuff of course but I think you’ll enjoy it just the same, it’s supposed to be very much more wholesome than our own food. Do you think you can manage to wait until then?”

  “When is closing time?”

  Michael looked tired. “I told you, about half an hour, say an hour at the outside.”

  “Oh.” John’s stomach rumbled beneath his grey waistcoat. “Yes, I think so. I don’t suppose they’d have a sandwich here, would they?”

  “They could probably make you one; but they’re not very easy on the pocket you know, John. In fact, they cos
t almost twice as much as a pint of their best bitter.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll hang on then.”

  “Good laddie.” Michael flexed his knees like a policeman. “In that case there’s just time for me to have a game of shove ha’penny with my friend Albert over there. I occasionally give him quite a good run for his money and I think I may be in form this morning. It’s a very skilled game, teaches one to be deliberate and to think ahead. I always call it the ‘working man’s chess’ and if you can acquit yourself well on the shove ha’penny board you’ll find that you’ll always enjoy the confidence of even the poorest clients later in life. If you like you can come and watch the game.”

  “No thanks! I think I’ll sit here for a bit but I can’t guarantee not to touch my cyder for another half-hour.”

  “Oh don’t worry about that, one mustn’t become a slave to one’s own rules. If you drink it reasonably slowly you’ll find it will sustain you until it’s time for us to go and meet Horab. Cyder’s a very healthy drink you know, apart from a little fruit-sugar and water there’s nothing much in it really.”

  Pint in hand he moved over eagerly to the far end of the room.

  John drank his cyder very slowly trying to make it last out against the clock behind the bar. In the long intervals between the sips he watched Mr Cudlopp drawing beer and accepting drinks from new customers, and became more and more interested in his manner of drinking. The high polish of his face, he noticed, was particularly marked over the upper lip where the surface of the beer rested when his glass was raised to his mouth. He wondered if perhaps, the beer in the course of the years might not have had some subtle effect on the skin, and began to calculate how many pints, quarts, and gallons, must have lain against that particular area of skin prior to its transit through his body. The trouble was that he did not know Mr Cudlopp’s age, nor how long he had been drinking at his present smooth pace; but the picture of an amber water-fall of beer at the rate of say four gallons a week, impinging almost ceaselessly on this human basin year in and year out, quite fascinated him and made him wonder why Mr Cudlopp allowed it to happen.