Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

  During the twenty minutes wait at Wilmore Junction he went for a cup of tea to the refreshment-room. He liked the Wilmore refreshment-room: it was bare, ugly, old-fashioned, but it was also familiar and hospitable. And he liked the woman who had served there all these years. He and she had become friends. They said nothing but the most commonplace things during their brief meetings, but they were glad to meet. Perhaps he was flattered by her always recognising him, even though, more than once, a year had elapsed between their meetings, and by the obvious fact that she was always so pleased to see him. But it was not only that. He liked her plain, friendly face and her pleasant voice.

  When he had gone and she had sat down once more to her knitting, she sighed to herself, for she had thought him looking unhappy. His eyes and his mouth—the sad pierrot’s mouth—were the same as they had been when he had first come timidly into the refreshment-room as a little boy. Later he had grown to look happier and more self-reliant, but now the old look had returned. What could have happened, she wondered? But of course there was nothing she could do. Why, when you came to think of it, she hardly knew him, though his rare visits had come to mean so much to her.

  An unusually large number of boys had left Taylor’s at the end of the summer, and Adrian returned in the autumn to find himself a prefect. The novelty of this, the change it brought into his life, his preliminary timidity, which however he successfully disguised and soon overcame, and the responsibility and importance of his new status, helped at first to distract his attention from the terrible emptiness of the place. But not for long. His life no longer had any centre. When he was in school or playing football or working at his music all was well, but when he returned to himself and there was no longer anything to distract his thoughts, a dull depression took hold of him and he moped in his study.

  The jovial Phipps did his best to rouse him, and occasionally he was successful. When his attempts failed, he lost patience and gave Adrian a piece of his mind.

  “The Lord knows what’s come over you, Adrian. Why can’t you pull yourself together, man? You never used to be like this. Being with you nowaday’s as bad as being at a blooming funeral.”

  To himself Adrian admitted that Phipps was right. It was not as if all this moping did the slightest good, whereas to pull himself together and do his best to shake himself free of his obsession could not very well make him more miserable than he was already, and might in the end make him happier. But it would be, while it lasted, a thankless job and he felt that he had not the energy to try.

  But in the end he did try. He had not yet written to Ronny nor had he heard from him, and now he refrained from writing. He even refrained, so far as he could, from thinking of him. He resumed the string trio, working away with pages of music manuscript spread all over his study table, to the astonishment of Phipps and his other friends. Mr. Heller was pleased to find that his last term’s neglect of music was at an end. He practised furiously now, so that, except when he was playing games or carrying out his duties as prefect, his friends saw almost nothing of him. When they did, they found him touchy and preoccupied: they could not make out what had come over him. It was only when he played games that they saw in him the Glynde they knew, for then he threw off his gloom and, it seemed, concentrated all his energies into those moments. He played football with a frenzied absorption that astonished them. Then, it seemed to him, he got to grips with something, something in himself which he exorcised in a fury of physical action. He played for Taylor’s now, and was, in fact, easily their best man, and it was almost certain that, when a vacancy occurred, he would play for the school. Even when the game was over he was, for a while, astonishingly, boisterously cheerful. But this cheerfulness soon exhausted itself and he plunged again into his black mood. There were times when he sickened even of music, but not for long. The sheer mastery of old Heller’s playing always drove away his gloom in the end; and when he himself played, the physical exercise soon released his feelings. But he wearied of his attempts at composition and gave up work on the trio.

  At the beginning of November Oliver Glynde had had a sharp attack of influenza, and when he was well enough to travel his doctor had advised him to go abroad to avoid the English winter. At first it had been decided that he was to go to the South of France and that Adrian should join him there for the holidays. Adrian was delighted at the prospect. He had never been abroad. What a gorgeous change from the rain and the boredom of Charminster it would be to go to a strange, exciting country where there was summer in winter. His grandfather had sent him a passport, and when he felt more depressed than usual he unfolded it and studied it with wondering absorption. But his hopes were disappointed. The weather reports from the Riviera were so bad that it was decided that Oliver Glynde must go further afield. He started, at the beginning of December, for Biskra, and Adrian spent Christmas at Yarn.

  Clara and Bob found him dull and irritable. Clara put it down to music. “Music,” she asserted, “is an unhealthy art. It’s all very well as a distraction, like tennis or chess, but Adrian overdoes it.”

  Bob laughed at this. “Nonsense, Clara,” he said. “The boy’s growing up, that’s all. He’s at the queer age, and getting through it pretty well, in my opinion.”

  But Adrian’s queerness, whatever its cause, did not abate during the following term. His friends found him just as unsatisfactory, just as indecipherable, as he had been in the autumn. To Adrian that Easter term was almost unendurable. The weather was bad, the weeks crawled past like months, the dreary routine of school was almost maddening. One evening he got out his trio and looked it over. There was a lot of it now, twelve pages of closely written manuscript. It seemed to him, as he looked through it, that he saw it very clearly. Its faults stood out, obvious and unmistakable, but its merits also stood out. He considered it carefully and with detachment, and he felt certain that on the whole it was remarkably good. “Yes,” he told himself, “it’s good, a very good job,” and, gathering the pages together, he tore them across, gathered the half-pages into packets and tore each packet across, then bundled the heap of torn paper into the waste-paper basket. The trio had served its purpose. He would write music, better music than this, later. He blew out his breath as though relieved of a burden. He was sick of the trio, and he was sick of his sentimental feelings about Ronny, and he was sick, sickest of all, of Charminster. Yes, that was the root of the matter: he had got out of Charminster all that it could give him, and, lingering on there now, he felt like one sitting at a feast when all the wine has been drunk and all the guests have gone. From Old Heller he still received much, very much; but old Heller was not Charminster. The fact that he had only one other pupil besides Adrian proved how remarkably little of Charminster he was.

  The term drew to a close in a dreary monotony of rain. The daily spectacle of rain on the windows, the yards and yards of wet asphalt that reflected blackly the meagre modern Gothic of the school-buildings, the stale smell of the ugly class-rooms, the gaunt, unlovely, hatefully familiar block of Taylor’s filled him with weary disgust. If the whole place had caught fire and burnt to the ground Adrian would have been delighted.

  He determined to get away from it, to get away for good. To return next term and again the term after would be unendurable: the mere thought of it was appalling.

  At last, ten days before the holidays, he wrote to his aunt Clara asking to be taken away from Charminster at the end of the term. It was a long, rambling letter which cost him immense pains to write. He was so anxious to convince her of the extreme seriousness of the matter, to let her see how strongly he felt, to force her to understand and sympathise, that the letter became a mere tangle of words and arguments. Clara, reading it with her eyebrows raised in surprise and mystification, decided at once that it had been fired off on the spur of the moment as the result of some temporary disturbance in Adrian’s school life. She heard no desperate cry in it, and indeed it needed a wiser and more human creature than Clara to detect it in that jumble of in
adequate reasons which were Adrian’s utterly unsuccessful attempt to explain feelings which even he himself did not understand. “By now,” she thought as she sat down to reply, “he will have settled down again,” and she wrote him one of her cool, matter-of-fact communications saying that she was sorry to hear he was out of sympathy with Charminster, that these moods did, she knew well, come over one from time to time, generally, she added to herself but not to Adrian, as a result of indigestion or continued bad weather. Sensible people, she wrote, set their jaws and persevered till the mood passed, as such moods always did sooner or later. She hoped, she said, that he would not suppose she did not understand or sympathise. She pointed out very reasonably that it would be a thousand pities to cut short his career at Charminster, and that to do so might ruin his chances at Oxford and would certainly be a bitter disappointment to his grandfather.

  Adrian had felt such an overwhelming desire to convince Clara that he had irrationally taken it for granted that his letter would do so. Her reply came as a crushing disillusionment, and, as a result, his mind turned upon her with a cold, detached criticism. “Understand!” he thought scornfully. “Of course she doesn’t understand. That’s the worst of her. She’s always so prim and cold and collected.” His anger against her was increased by her statement that his leaving school would be a blow to his grandfather, for he recognised, but would not admit to himself, that this might be true. If his grandfather had been within easier reach he would have written to him in the first instance. Now he felt it would not be quite decent to appeal to him over Clara’s head, after having tried and failed to obtain her assent to his wishes. He retired into his gloom and raged internally. It seemed to him that whenever his feelings were strongly concerned he was sure to be thwarted by people or circumstances. In old days he had never had enough of his father and was always being unexpectedly repulsed by his mother. Later he had been harassed by the insecurity of his hopes of holidays at Yarn. Later still, the longing he had fixed on his mother had been rudely shattered, and when in his loneliness he had set his affections on Ronny Dakyn, he had got more misery than happiness out of it. Now they were going to force him to do what his whole being cried out against, to compel him to stay on at this hateful spot.

  In these circumstances the prospect of holidays at Yarn had lost all its attraction. He was delighted, when the day came, to leave Charminster, but his mind was set against Yarn. A ferment of wild schemes boiled within him. As he drove to the station with Phipps he cast a final look from the window of the cab at Charminster, gaunt, chilly, and soulless behind a curtain of fine rain. “Well, of all the lousy holes …!” he muttered.

  “Oh, of course it’s a lousy hole,” said Phipps gaily. “Every school’s a lousy hole, automatically. But, all the same, I like the old place.”

  “You like it, Flipper? You honestly mean to say you like it?”

  “Of course I like it. I love it.”

  “Well,” said Adrian, “all I can say is that if I was one of those Old Testament blighters I’d call down fire from heaven and burn the damned place to a frazzle.”

  “Thanks!” said Phipps. “And what about the inmates?”

  “Them too!” said Adrian.

  “Thanks again!” said Phipps, a little wounded.

  Adrian laughed. “Oh, not you, Flipper! I’d make an exception of you and Old Hell and a brief list, a very brief list, of others.” He glanced through the rain again. “Yes,” he said, “an exceedingly lousy hole!”

  XXVII

  When he had reached Waterloo and bidden good-bye to Phipps, Adrian had his trunk despatched direct to Yarn, and then, taking only a small suitcase, got into a cab and drove, not to Paddington, but to Charing Cross. He deposited his suitcase in the cloak-room and went out into the Strand. His mind was busy, alert, full of clear-cut plans. Ever since the days when he had lived with his mother and father in London, he had had a small account at the bank, to which from time to time he had added. It amounted now to over fifty pounds, and had for the last year been in his own control. He took a bus to the bank now and drew out the whole sum. He then made a few other purchases and bought a rucksack, sent a wire to Clara saying, “Don’t expect me for some days. Writing,” and then returned to Charing Cross and lunched at the hotel.

  After lunch he went to the little writing-room on the first floor and sat down to write letters. For some time he sat staring in front of him, gnawing his pen. Then slowly and laboriously he began to write. “Dear Aunt Clara, Your answer to my letter was a great disappointment to me. I wouldn’t have written that letter if I hadn’t been really horribly fed up. Really and truly I can’t return to Charminster next term: I simply couldn’t stand another term of it. I quite see what you say about it in your letter, but the fact is I would rather die than go back. If I were to come to Yarn now, you would naturally try to talk me round. But I can’t argue about it: I only know that I must clear out of Charminster. So I think I had better not come to Yarn at present. Arguing would only make us all unhappy. You and Uncle Bob would get angry with me, and I could do nothing but be as stubborn as a mule, because I couldn’t, really I couldn’t, give in and go back. So I’m going abroad instead. I’m starting this evening or to-morrow morning and shall post this just before I go. I am writing to Grandfather now, explaining everything to him as well as I can. I am sure he will understand. I’ll write to you often, so don’t worry about me, and don’t you and Uncle Bob be too angry with me. You wouldn’t be, if you knew how thoroughly fed up I’ve been.”

  Having finished this letter and put it in his pocket, he wrote a long one to his grandfather and posted it in the letter-box in the hall of the hotel. Then he went out into the station-yard. He knew there was a Cook’s Travel Bureau there. Fortunately he already had the passport which his grandfather had sent him four months ago. But how did one get a ticket, how find out all the necessary details about the journey? He had no idea. He had never been out of England, and the thought of going abroad filled him with misgivings. He went and gazed tentatively into Cook’s window; then, overcome with cowardice, sheered off and went into the station, where he strolled unconsciously to and fro, propelled by his nervous excitement. He clenched his teeth to prevent them chattering. Then he turned and went back to Cook’s and walked straight in.

  A quiet, middle-aged man attended to him. “I want to go to Carcassonne in France,” said Adrian. “Would you please tell me …” He had chosen Carcassonne because Phipps had spent the previous Easter holidays there and had told him wonderful things about it.

  The middle-aged man showed no surprise at his request, but immediately took up a railway guide and turned to the necessary page. He asked Adrian when he wanted to start. “I could start this afternoon,” Adrian replied. “But is it.… Could I …?”

  The middle-aged man perhaps noticed his agitation, for he asked him if he had been abroad before. When Adrian told him he had not, he proceeded to explain everything to him in quiet, leisurely tones, jotting down times, places, and scraps of useful information on a piece of paper. It was, it appeared, the easiest thing in the world to go to Carcassonne. “You can speak French?” he asked Adrian.

  “Yes, after a fashion,” said Adrian with a shy smile.

  “In that case you’ll have no difficulty,” the man told him.

  Adrian left the bureau with a second single to Carcassonne in his pocket, feeling enormously reassured. The boat-train, it appeared, left Victoria at four o’clock.

  In his anxiety, he reached Victoria an hour before train time. There was nothing for him to do there but hang about till his train came in. He inspected the indicator and discovered his platform. Then he strolled towards the bookstall.

  Before he had reached it he was stopped by a voice behind him. “Hallo, Glynde!”

  He turned, and did not at first recognise the large, heavily built man. Then he held out his hand. “Hallo, Ellenger!”

  “You don’t happen to have seen Ronny about, do you?” Ellenger asked.

/>   “What, here?” Adrian’s heart leapt to his throat at the thought of meeting Ronny. He turned and glanced about among the crowd.

  “Oh, I don’t think he’s here,” said Ellenger, “but I thought he might be. I wrote and asked him to lunch, and told him I was leaving here at three-fifteen, so that if he couldn’t manage lunch, he might perhaps meet me here for a few minutes. But he didn’t turn up for lunch and I don’t suppose he’ll come now.”

  Ellenger’s face was more closed and enigmatical than ever, but his voice was friendly. He seemed quite pleased at meeting Adrian.

  “Where are you off to now?” Adrian asked.

  “Home. You see, I’m going away … leaving England … to-morrow, and I had to come up on business this morning. I thought he might meet me as it was the last chance.”

  “Leaving England? For good, you mean?”

  “I’ve got a job in Peru. I’m joining an uncle out there.”

  Adrian hesitated, and then said: “I’ll come and see you into your train if you don’t mind. Mine doesn’t go for an hour.”

  Ellenger gave him one of those rare smiles of his. “It’ll be awfully nice if you will,” he said.

  They went together towards the platform. “You’ll be away for some time then?” said Adrian when he had got a platform-ticket.

  “I shan’t be back for four or five years, if then,” said Ellenger. He glanced down the platform in front of them. “No signs of Ronny,” he said. “He won’t turn up. But I thought there was just the chance.”

  Adrian was suddenly overcome with sympathy for this large, unhappy creature. He longed to show his goodwill, but all he could say was: “Four or five years sounds a long time, but of course it isn’t really.”

  Ellenger chose a third smoker, got in, shut the door, and leaned out of the window. “I was lucky to meet you,” he said, looking down at Adrian. Then a look of embarrassment crossed his face. “I wonder if you’d do me a favour,” he said awkwardly. “It’s a strange thing to ask, but if you would do your best to persuade Ronny to write occasionally.… You’ll be seeing him, won’t you?”