Swan River

by David Reynolds

  She had gone out with Stanley, walked in fields and woods, and had a drink in an empty pub. She had screamed at him, and she had hit him with her fists which she clenched in front of her aunt and banged on the table. She shouted at Kate that she had hated him, that she still hated him. Then, for the first time in a long while, she faced her aunt, stared at her through her tears and told her, in a whisper that Kate could barely hear, that she had begged him to leave his wife, to be with her.

  There was a long silence. The child lay asleep on her mother’s lap. Sis spoke loudly again, telling her aunt that Stanley had said he couldn’t leave, that he loved her but he couldn’t be with her.

  The silence resumed and was broken eventually by long, low sobbing. Kate reached across the table and clutched Sis’s hand. Sis shouted, ‘I am mad!’ Looking at her aunt, she then spoke quietly, telling her that she had made love with Stanley that afternoon – on his coat, in a field, behind a hedge. She had known she wouldn’t see him again. She hadn’t cared that he was married.

  Kate pulled her hand away and covered Kathleen’s upturned ear. She had nothing to say. Adultery happened in books and occasionally to other people, never to anyone you knew or were related to. She had never heard, or read, of such a scene as Sis had just described. She didn’t approve. She would, of course, tell no one. Other than that, she knew only that she wanted time to think.

  Her confession over, Sis stood and walked aimlessly about the room. Kate sat silent at the table and the child slept on. Sis turned to her and spoke words that Kate remembered years later, ‘Don’t judge me. You can’t know how it is…how it was. No one can, except me.’

  8

  With the Toffs and Swells

  Deborah didn’t make another drawing of La Frascetti. Instead she gave me the original as a going-away present. On a warm May afternoon, as my parents drank tea with the house-master, I took it from my trunk and hung it from a coat hook on the green plywood partition that separated my cubicle from the next in a long dormitory with a high, steepled ceiling.

  That evening at 9.30 pm, just before lights out, a red-cheeked prefect told me to take it down: the coat hooks were for clothes only and no decorations were permitted on cubicle walls. I could place framed photographs of members of my family on top of the chest of drawers; that was all. I told him that La Frascetti was a member of my family. He looked at the drawing, turned it upside down so that he could see my great aunt’s face the right way up, stared at me with some apprehension and said, ‘Are you sure?’ I told him that she had been my great uncle’s wife, a music-hall artiste. He said he was sorry; it wasn’t a photograph. I had no photographs, framed or unframed.

  Next day, I discovered that I had a cupboard in which to keep my school books in a room called Hall, where junior boys spent their small portions of spare time and did their prep. There was a nail on the inside of one of the two doors and La Frascetti hung on it for the next four terms.

  * * * * *

  Polegate was tall and olive-skinned and the only boy in my house who was in the same form as me. Wearing my regulation black gown over my tweed sports jacket and regulation blue tie, I followed him along brown corridors with parquet flooring towards my first lesson, maths. I tried to befriend him by asking sensible questions.

  ‘What’s the maths teacher like?’

  ‘They are not teachers. They are dons.’ He looked over his shoulder and down at me, and carried on walking.

  ‘What’s the don like then?’

  He looked back at me and sighed, ‘Mr Silversmith. Strange. Funny. You’ll see.’

  ‘Are you a wet bob or a dry bob?’ Wet bobs rowed. Dry bobs played cricket. I had chosen to be a wet bob simply because I liked rivers.

  He spun half round and frowned down at me. ‘Wet bob, of course.’

  ‘Do you row in an eight?’

  ‘No, a four.’

  ‘Are you rowing this afternoon? I think I am.’

  ‘Yes. Now stop asking questions.’

  He walked on, taking large strides. I hurried along behind him, trying to hold my books against my chest with one hand like he did. We turned a corner and Polegate almost collided with our housemaster, Mr Bird.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Good morning, Polegate.’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘What’s Mr Bird like, would you say?’

  ‘Questions, er…Reynolds! Questions! You must stop asking questions. We’re in a hurry.’

  I followed him in silence as he threaded his way through groups of black-gowned boys coming the other way. To our left were classroom doors, some of them open displaying desks, blackboards and boys sitting and standing about; sun streamed in through tall windows and there was a cacophony of heels on parquet, loud voices and laughter. To our right were more windows. I glanced out at a vast tract of green; mown grass stretched to a distant, blurred horizon and the sky was as blue as it ever is in England. To the left was a cricket pavilion standing high on a grassy mound; red brick with white-painted gables and balconies, it looked like some of the smart villas near the river in Marlow. Beyond it the grass was sullied only by an occasional clump of trees and a few picturesque wooden huts which I was to discover were lesser cricket pavilions and good for smoking in at night. We left the corridor momentarily and crossed some gravel under an arch; to my left I glimpsed a grassy quadrangle with diagonal paths before we entered a replica of the corridor we had just left.

  Polegate grabbed the handle of a green-painted door and entered in front of me. The room was full of boys sitting at desks talking loudly and laughing. Polegate turned, sighed and pointed at an empty desk one row from the back; he walked away and sat in the front row by the window.

  I sat down and fiddled with my pile of books. A few boys glanced at me curiously and then looked away. A minute later the door was suddenly thrown open and a small, round man with a greying crew cut shot across the front of the room to the window, his gown flying behind him. He glared around the room angrily and then, taking huge steps on very short legs, placed himself behind the teacher’s desk in front of the blackboard.

  ‘Welcome back, Set… One.’ He looked at the far corners of the room and then down at the desk in front of him. ‘Adcock.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Addis.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Beauchamp.’

  He paused after a boy called Chandler had said ‘Sir,’ and looked around as though mystified. ‘Chandler. Where… is Chandler?’

  A pale boy to my left put his hand up. ‘Here sir.’

  ‘Stand up Chandler. You’re new… Scholarship boy. Excellent maths papers. Very good… Chandler. Sit down.’ He spoke very fast with pauses in unexpected places.

  The litany halted again at Partington. ‘Where are… you Partington?’

  He was small and sharp-faced and sitting by the door. His cheeks coloured up when he stood up. ‘An exhibition. Very high maths mark. Well done.’

  ‘Thank you sir.’

  ‘Are you related to J.P. …Partington?’

  ‘My cousin, sir.’

  ‘Hopeless… Hopeless…’ – he spat the word while scratching the back of his head – ‘at maths, but… excellent wing three-quarter.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Sit down, Partington.’

  The roll-call continued, and now I knew what to expect. ‘Reynolds.’

  ‘Sir.’

  He looked around. ‘We have three new boys: Chandler, Partington and …’ He looked down at his desk. ‘Reynolds… Now where is… Reynolds?’

  ‘Here sir.’ I put up my hand and began to stand up.

  ‘Did I ask you to stand up?’ He glared at me in horror, his mouth wide open.

  ‘No sir.’ I sat down amid muffled giggles.

  ‘Stand up please… Reynolds.’

  I stood with both hands lightly touching the sides of the desk, looked at Mr Silversmith and tried to smile. ‘Stop grinning, pleas
e.’ There was more giggling. I stared at the back of the boy in front of me. There was silence except for a rustling of paper. I glanced upwards. He had turned his back to the window and was staring at a clipboard. ‘94 per cent in Maths A… 89 in Maths B. I remember your B paper, Reynolds. You rushed a couple of quadratic equations. Over… confident I expect. It pays to… take it slowly. Otherwise, not bad. Very good. Sit down.’ I sat and breathed a long breath out – and had a sudden vision of Nick from my old school; how would he cope in the top maths set at Eton?

  ‘Open your books!’ He barked the command. ‘At page one… hundred.’

  I scrabbled through, found the page and looked up.

  ‘And,’ he drew the word out, ‘for-ty.’

  I found page 140 and looked up again.

  ‘Seven!’ He giggled, and leered at us with small grey teeth. The other boys laughed. The joke was aimed at Chandler, Partington and me.

  Page 147 was simultaneous equations. Mr Silversmith spoke, shouted and whispered, and wrote at great speed on the board frequently breaking the chalk. For fifteen minutes we had to solve equations from the book. One of them had some wavy brackets in it that I had not seen before; I made a guess at what they might mean. As we worked, Mr Silversmith stalked the rows of desks on tiptoes, clutching his gown tight to him as though trying to keep warm. He looked at our work as he passed, but never broke step.

  A sudden yell of ‘Stop!’ broke my concentration. ‘Beauchamp, Chandler, Hunt, Partington, Jackson-Smith, Reynolds… come here.’ He glared around the room. ‘The rest of you, carry on. There are…’ he looked exaggeratedly at his watch, and I noticed that his wrist was white and fleshy, ‘nine more minutes.’

  We grouped around his desk and he jabbed his finger at the second equation, staring at us with a hurt expression. ‘You don’t know what this means, do you?’

  Chandler and I both murmured, ‘No sir.’

  He sighed. ‘Does anyone have any idea?’

  ‘The sine of what is inside the brackets sir?’ Hunt looked down at him hopefully.

  There was a silence during which Mr Silversmith put his head in his hands, and then very slowly, without getting up from his chair, pulled the back of his gown up and over his head. Loud laughter came from the rest of the class and someone even banged the lid of his desk. Polegate leaned back in his seat, smirking. With a sudden movement Mr Silversmith stood up, swept his gown back, pushed his face into Hunt’s and said with great precision, ‘Tan-gent,’ splitting the syllables as if the one word were two. He stared round at the six of us. ‘Tan-gent, gentlemen. Take the tan-gent of whatever is within the brackets. Back to your desks. There are…’ – he looked at his watch again – ‘six more minutes.’

  * * * * *

  The next lesson was physics. Polegate was in a different set, so he arranged that Hunt show me where to go. I already felt that I liked Hunt; he was chirpy and freckly and had kept smiling through Mr Silversmith’s tangent performance. We walked together through arches and quads, past a clock-tower and along a paved path between old red-brick buildings called fives courts.

  We reached a flat-roofed, concrete building and entered a room where boys were sitting on tall stools at benches with sinks and taps. I had done no physics before so I was in the bottom set with Hunt, Chandler and a lot of seemingly older boys, many of whom had lumpy names; Upjohn, Ormrod, Bracegirdle and Hincks were hairy and broad-shouldered, and sat in that order in the back row where they whispered and started small fires from time to time.

  * * * * *

  That afternoon, among a stream of boys, Hunt and I bicycled the three miles to the boathouses on the Thames. The river was a sea of sleek boats – eights, fours and single skulls – moving at different speeds in all directions. Coxes in peaked caps shouted and banged the sides of boats with their fists, and coaches rode bicycles along the towpath bellowing in competition with each other.

  I had my first lesson in a heavy, wide, wooden boat called a tub. It was hard, but after a while I began to relax, pull strongly on my oar and even enjoy the experience. Suddenly I felt a great thwack in my solar plexus; my oar seemed to have got stuck in the water. I was winded and pushed off my seat into the arms of the boy behind me. The boat rocked and spun and water cascaded all over me.

  Our coach, a prefect called Richards, found it funny as he told me that I had caught a crab because my strokes were too long; I should lift my blade out of the water sooner; I was trying too hard. This was contrary to my father’s advice about getting the most out of life, but I was prepared to do anything to avoid being hit in the stomach by a heavy piece of wood. So I tried less hard, and rowed better.

  I had to wait for Hunt, so I wandered a little way up the towpath and looked around. I remembered the dark majesty of Quarry Wood rising behind the lock in Marlow. These bleak fields were no substitute. The countryside was flat and the river here, south of Oxford, was narrow. As I stood there, looking at the horizon and trying to shut out the shouting, sweating oarsmen in the foreground, a line of swans came round a wide bend, a quarter of a mile to the east.

  Hunt came up and told me that, if I liked gazing at swans, I should join the fishing club.

  * * * * *

  My parents visited every third Sunday which was as often as they were allowed. Because it was so small, the A35 attracted attention beside the Bentleys, Jaguars and Rovers on the gravel under the horse chestnuts by the pavilion. My father attracted attention because of his age, his hat, his trousers which were a little too short, his new hearing aid with its wire dangling from his ear to a brass microphone clipped to his breast pocket, and his outspokenness. My mother, despite clothes that didn’t come from Harrods or Peter Jones, blended in – her father and uncles had been at the school after all.

  On their first visit they brought photographs of themselves. My father’s was a studio portrait taken in 1947 – he had cut it out of a copy of his autobiography; my mother’s was more up to date – a fixed-smile polyphoto from a set taken for my grandmother. Facing each other in a new, brown leather frame which opened like a book and stood on my chest of drawers beside my hair brushes, they looked like a conventional couple of similar age – my father frowning and exuding gravitas in a dark jacket and puffed-out tie, my mother showing a little teeth with hair newly shampooed and set and a piece of costume jewellery holding her blouse together – and not at all like the real thing, an elderly seed salesman and his middle-aged wife who worked in a shop, or, as I still liked to see them, the cleverest, funniest man and the most loving, unselfish woman in the world.

  On their third visit, a hot Saturday in late June, they brought Deborah with them. I took her to see my cupboard in Hall, so that she would know that La Frascetti was displayed in the only place possible. I found that boys were staring at her and making faces at me, and for the first time I glimpsed her through other males’ eyes. She was slim, as she had always been, and wore her dark hair neck-length and parted a little to one side, as she always had. In blue jeans and a white T-shirt – the kind of clothes she wore to the library and the Odeon in Marlow – she wasn’t overdressed, unlike many of the boys’ sisters who hung around on the gravel on Sunday mornings in hats, silk blouses and pearls. Like me, she was thirteen, approaching fourteen, and I could see – as other boys raised their eyebrows knowingly at me behind her back – that she was a teenager, not a girl – Audrey Hepburn, not Hayley Mills.

  Deborah’s looks and her habit of holding my hand gained me some kudos among my peers. On that first visit, she seized my hand and swung it as we dithered on the gravel by the A35 waiting for my parents to extricate themselves from drinks with the housemaster. Several boys were nearby watching us and others were peering from windows. I was embarrassed, but pleased to find when I returned in the evening that my new friends – and some who had not been so friendly – were keen to know all about her.

  Was she my girlfriend? Had I snogged with her? Had she got a sister? Did she write me letters? Had I got a photograph of her?
There were cruder questions than these which I pretended not to hear, but I grabbed at the opportunity to boost my status, playing up my relationship with Deborah as far as I reasonably could, implying that we were boyfriend and girlfriend who snogged at every opportunity – and I wrote asking her to send a photograph.

  The truth was that we had walked around a pub garden talking while my father snoozed and my mother read the Daily Telegraph. I had loved being with her; seeing her climbing out of the A35 had reminded me of the freedom I had lost – something that was constantly on my mind anyway – but talking to her had clarified my conviction that I would regain it – once I had done my duty. She kept telling me that I wouldn’t be at this school for ever, that there would be years afterwards when I could do exactly what I liked.

  As I lay awake that night in my drab cubicle in the high-ceilinged dormitory, I remembered what Deborah had said and decided that when I left I would get a job, any job, and enjoy the freedom that earning my own money would bring.

  * * * * *

  Hunt and Chandler and a boy in my house called Connolly, who had wavy blond hair and played the guitar, became my closest friends. But I was generally accepted by the crowd, and I had no enemies – beyond those prefects who used their power to torment us fags with laborious and unnecessary tasks.

  There was a boy, who joined my house in the term I did, who had no friends. His name was Jessop. He was tall and awkward in his movements and, when I met him – on my first day at school – a little supercilious and pleased with himself; he certainly wanted me to know that he had won a scholarship. The group soon decided that he was stuck-up and homosexual – which was ironic, since the majority of the boys were homosexual to a degree during their schooldays.