School for Love

by Olivia Manning

  ‘But I can’t do that. You see, she was kind and . . .’

  ‘You’d better let your Baghdad friend deal with her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Felix agreed despondently, afraid the Consul would tell him to move to the Y.M.C.A. Now it was no longer a debt of gratitude, but the presence of Mrs Ellis that kept him in Miss Bohun’s house; he worried for some time, expecting to be presented with the ultimatum that either he left or gave up his pocket money.

  The Consul must have paid up without question, for Felix heard no more about it, but something else occurred that seemed to him worse. Mrs Ellis, without warning him, disappeared from the meal table. Miss Bohun made no comment and Felix, left alone to suffer her censure, had not the courage to ask about Mrs Ellis. Sometimes he heard Mrs Ellis leave her room but he did not run out to intercept her – he kept to his room if he knew she was in the house; he did not go into the garden if she were there. He was hurt and yet he felt cool and aloof from her, as though he had thrown off a burden. He decided he would not attempt to speak to her again. He cared for nobody – nobody and nothing in the world except Faro; he said to Faro again: ‘I love you; I love you.’ He knew he really did love Faro; he would often lift her in his arms to the level of his face and rub his smooth cheek against the very tender fur of her throat; then he would carry her round the room, she purring, her eyes, oblique to watch him, half-closed in ecstasy. Faro was natural and genuine and would never disillusion him or put him unfairly in the wrong.

  After a week had passed, it seemed to him that his own aloofness from her had somehow cancelled out Mrs Ellis’s indifference; now he could see her again and start afresh without any danger to his pride. He knew suddenly, then, that he did want to see and speak to her again; and in an instant he was possessed with the idea and could not bear the thought of waiting until she returned. But he had no idea where to find her. During the afternoon he kept going to his window and watching for her; at last, about six o’clock, as the sun was dropping in the sky, he saw her coming over the wasteland. He went back to his desk and composed himself so that he could appear the more naturally out of his door as she came along the passage. At last, scarcely able to bear his own excitement, he burst out of the room and said, ‘Hello’ into her face.

  She answered casually: ‘Hello. Where have you been all this time?’

  ‘Where have you been? You haven’t had any meals here for ages.’

  ‘Well,’ she answered reasonably, ‘I told you I was going to stop having meals in. I didn’t see why I should pay so much for her beastly food. The trouble is she is making me pay sixteen pounds a month for the room alone – so it’s damned expensive. . . .’

  ‘But how can she possibly charge sixteen pounds?’ asked Felix, drawn at once into the entrancing game of discussing Miss Bohun. ‘She told me the food cost most.’

  ‘Well, she does charge sixteen pounds,’ Mrs Ellis shrugged a little, seeming rather bored with the game at the moment. ‘What did you do at Easter?’

  He copied her slight shrug. Easter had come and gone since he last saw her. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Miss Bohun may be religious, but she doesn’t seem to think much about those things. I mentioned it and she said: “What, Easter already! There’s always something. . . .”’

  Felix’s attempt to copy Miss Bohun’s exasperated uninterest made Mrs Ellis burst out laughing: ‘Come in,’ she said as she opened her door.

  Felix had not been in her room since the night Miss Bohun had burst in and ordered him and Nikky out. He entered happily, sniffing the scent in the air as though it were something on which he could get a tangible hold.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Ellis, ‘if you’d been around I’d have taken you to see the Holy Fire.’

  ‘What Holy Fire?’

  ‘A ceremony in the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Saturday. The Greek patriarch produced fire from Heaven – I’ve never seen such a crowd. People went quite crazy; they almost set the church alight.’

  ‘No! And you didn’t take me?’ His distress was so poignant he could scarcely keep it from his voice.

  ‘Oh,’ Mrs Ellis was remorseful now that she saw his suffering, ‘I would have asked you if I could – but one of Nikky’s friends at the café gave me the tickets so I had to ask Nikky to come.’

  ‘But . . . but couldn’t you have got another ticket?’

  ‘No. They’re very difficult to get. But don’t look so miserable. I promise you if we’re both here next Easter I’ll take you.’

  It was poor consolation. Felix sat on the edge of the bed trying to pull himself out of his hurt; it was like a bitterness of disappointment inside him although he had expected nothing. Somehow it was related to the past when the year had been so beautifully hung, like garlands, on the four secure props of Easter, his birthday in July, his mother’s in September, and then Christmas. The sense of security had gone quickly enough when the Shiptons had forgotten all about him last Christmas. He had expected nothing this Easter – and yet here he was wretched because there had, after all, been something, but not for him. He made an effort to say with interest, betraying nothing:

  ‘What is this Holy Fire for?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s Pentecost.’

  ‘What’s Pentecost?’

  ‘My dear boy, don’t ask me. You are incredibly ignorant, Felix. People ought to know more at your age than when they’re grown up.’

  His indignation at the unreasonableness of this statement raised him from his dejection and they argued happily enough for half an hour. When she told him to go because she wanted to change her dress, she said: ‘Would you like to come to the café to-night?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Come along after dinner. I’ll look out for you.’

  When he arrived Mrs Ellis was sitting alone at a table where she had had dinner. She was smoking and drinking coffee.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You are the first.’

  ‘Are other people coming?’

  ‘Nikky probably – and his friends. They usually drop in.’

  Felix was glad to have Mrs Ellis to himself for a while. Almost at once he started to talk about his mother, feeling in some way that his devotion to Mrs Ellis left him in debt to his mother’s memory. Mrs Ellis, her elbows on the table, her eyes narrowed against the smoke, watched him with a sleepy half-interest that he found exciting. He told her about his mother’s lovely dresses and how she would sometimes ask him to choose one for her, but she never accepted his choice because he was not good at choosing; she would say: ‘Yes, darling, that is a nice dress – but I think I had better wear the pink,’ or ‘the black’; how she was rather religious, but not a lot; she would read C. S. Lewis aloud to him, but would play bridge on Sunday afternoons with the Shiptons and Mr Turner-Tufley and say: ‘I am sure God has no objection to our having a little fun’; how Mr Turner-Tufley was very nice and had a wife in England whom he had not seen for years; how Felix’s mother would sometimes sigh when Mr Turner-Tufley went, and put her arms round Felix’s neck and say: ‘Anyway, I always have my little boy.’ And she was terribly artistic and good at interior decoration and could paint table-mats and make lamp-shades . . .

  ‘Did she make that frilly thing in your room?’ asked Mrs Ellis.

  ‘Yes, and she was terribly clever at buying things. She always bought the right things, and she didn’t pay much, either. People were always saying: “How clever you are, Mrs Latimer”, and she used to say to me, “You wait, Felix, with all these things, we’ll have such a lovely home in England”. She had boxes of things. I wanted to keep them but the Shiptons sold them; they said I’d need the money for my education.’ After a pause, he asked her: ‘Did you have a lovely home in Cairo?’

  ‘Good Lord, no; we had no home at all. I had a job at G.H.Q. and I lived in the Pyramids pension. The Americans bought up all the flats in Cairo. We couldn’t compete. The best we ever had was a double bedroom at Shepheard’s, but that was luxury.’

  The words ‘luxury’ and �
��Shepheard’s’ and ‘double bedroom’ filled Felix’s imagination with visions of such splendour and passion that he breathed fervently: ‘Oh, yes, like the films,’ and Mrs Ellis burst out laughing.

  When Nikky arrived he came at once to their table, and he and Mrs Ellis discussed some scholarship to England he seemed to hope to receive. Indeed, though he would, if persuaded, repeat his stories about the ‘Ever-Readies’, Felix later found he was never as funny again. Felix became rather bored with Nikky’s scholarship and the question of where Nikky might or might not stay if he went to London. Felix did not know London. Places called Bloomsbury, Euston and Chelsea had no reality for him. He was not interested in them, because in England he would live in the country. They could not have had more for Nikky, but his interest in them seemed at times almost like a drunken excitement. He kept saying: ‘One thing I must see, it is Piccadilly . . .’ or ‘the Strand,’ or ‘Fleet Street.’

  Felix was glad when other people began to arrive and they talked of something else. By nine o’clock six or seven young men had arrived – Jews, Arabs and Poles – and a profound discussion followed about some people called . . . Felix got these names right because when he whispered to Mrs Ellis: ‘Who are they talking about?’ she broke up an empty cigarette carton and wrote on the inside: ‘Kafka, Palinurus, Sartre’. ‘But who are they?’ Felix whispered, desperate to penetrate the mysteries of this rapid, excited talk; but Mrs Ellis, on the point of saying something to the table, shushed Felix aside and years were to pass before he discovered.

  During the following weeks, when Felix went to the Innsbruck as often as he dared, he became used to the curious names that came and went in everyone’s conversation, unquestioned as clichés and apparently pertinent to everyone except Felix. No one here – Jews and Arabs though they were – ever spoke of Palestine’s private war that was marking time now until the World War ended. Felix soon discovered that these young men were proud of the friendship that held them together and aloof from the political tension that kept Jews and Arabs apart. One or other of them would usually point out to Mrs Ellis during the evening: ‘Madam, you see here a most unique. What are we! Myself, an Arab, my friend a Jew; and so the others, Jews and Arabs, mixing in intellectual amity. Were all to act in such a way, the problems of Palestine would be solved. My friend here, Mr Finkelstein, is an intellectual, and as such his sympathies are naturally with us Arabs. He does not much like other Jews. To him, they are narrow, stupid, full of religious prejudice. Myself, I see the shortcomings of the Arabs – how are they educated? To recite the Koran, no more. Such is not enough in a world of this size where there are paintings, so many literatures, the telephone, Professor Einstein, the radio, the films and Salvador Dali.’

  Nikky, when he was away from them, would affect to find short-comings in the intellectuality of this circle, but Felix was completely dazzled by it. He had never before known people whose conversation was devoted exclusively to sex and the arts. The young Moslem Arabs were fervent in the support of the freedom of all Moslem women (except perhaps their own close relatives), and the young Jews deplored as embarrassingly vulgar the licence of the settlements, whose women drove the repressed and ignorant Arabs wild by the swing of their breasts and buttocks and the briefness of their shorts.

  Mrs Ellis, who seldom did more than help the conversation with an occasional question, was regarded as the group’s chief ornament – a brilliant and beautiful woman; an Englishwoman who, unlike almost all other Englishwomen, was not stiff, narrow, proud, prudish and contemptuous of ‘the natives’. When she assured them that the young women in England were more often like her than like the wives of Government officials, they laughed uproariously and said: ‘You are making the propaganda, are you not?’ and they were all more or less in love with her originality.

  Felix, who lived in the same house as Mrs Ellis and had seen her first, felt he must be much more in love than anyone. Now he listened like a dog for her comings and goings and could scarcely bear to let her go out without him, yet beneath his adoration there remained like a bruise the fact she had gone to the Holy Fire, taking Nikky and not him. Something within him was shaken and ready to fall.

  At the first opportunity he asked her to tell him the story she had told Nikky about the shipwreck. ‘I couldn’t hear it,’ he said. ‘I kept going to sleep.’

  ‘Not now; you must never ask anyone to repeat cold a story he’s told when warmed up.’

  ‘But couldn’t you get warmed up again?’

  ‘Perhaps. But I’m not warmed up now.’

  Several times later he tried to get the story from her, but she would not tell it. Whenever he thought of it he was jealous that she should tell it to Nikky and not to him. Sometimes he would hurry through his work in the afternoon so he would be free to go out with her on the following morning and walk in the sunlight, on the pavements crowded with shoppers.

  Everything she said and did delighted him. Although she did not use much slang herself, she occasionally approved of something with the words ‘smashing’ and ‘bang on’, or disapproved by describing them as ‘foul’ or ‘bloody’. These terms entranced Felix and soon displaced his own ‘super’ and ‘beastly’.

  It seemed to him that the smallest of incidents experienced in Mrs Ellis’s company could help change his view of life. He had accepted without question his mother’s philosophy which described everyone as ‘rather sweet’ or ‘fundamentally really rather nice’. If his mother came into contact with anger, rudeness or dishonesty, she somehow shook those things off with a little movement of the shoulders, a little lift of the head, that placed her above them. ‘Poor darling,’ she would say, ‘no doubt something’s worrying him (or her). Always remember, Felix darling, that everyone has his troubles.’ This attitude carried her through life with the minimum of hurt and anxiety, but Felix felt that even if he could convey it to Mrs Ellis, it would not work with her. Life itself seemed to change within her aura. People in contact with her were not always at their best. He began to wonder if those ‘rather sweet’ and ‘fundamentally nice’ people who had peopled his mother’s world had a real existence anywhere at all.

  One morning, walking in the Jaffa Road, they were stopped by a little English couple – the wife plain and badly dressed; the husband a junior and never likely to be much more. As they spoke, their four eyes were fixed on Mrs Ellis as though they wanted to hypnotise her. They had a perambulator for sale and Miss Bohun had told them Mrs Ellis might be interested.

  ‘Well, I might,’ she agreed cautiously, ‘how much do you want for it?’

  ‘Twenty-five pounds,’ said the husband promptly.

  Mrs Ellis smiled without friendliness; ‘I was thinking of buying a pram, not a small car.’

  Their faces fell as they realised this was a refusal. Felix’s mother would probably have said: ‘Poor things, no doubt they need the money’; and now the wonderful chance of making money out of someone – not another official, just an outsider – had faded. The wife was explaining how her husband had improved the perambulator, perhaps it hadn’t been worth much when they got it, but now—

  ‘Oh, I only want an ordinary pram,’ said Mrs Ellis and as they moved off she said without lowering her voice: ‘Bloody little scroungers! You could see their eyes fairly popping with avarice!’ and Felix thrilled, realising that that indeed was the truer comment.

  She said: ‘Of course all the dumbest types end up in the Colonial Service – people without sparkle, poise, depth, intellect, or anything but that smug mediocrity that makes them think themselves the salt of the earth. God, no wonder the Arabs and Jews despise them. And the nearer the top you go, the more frightful they are. Take the Radletts . . .’

  ‘The Radletts!’ breathed Felix, awed that she criticised these important people.

  ‘What a charming couple! They’re notorious, of course – as mean as cat’s meat. He’s a sour little fellow who drinks whisky in front of his guests and only offers them beer. She’s the quintessence o
f suburbia. She looks like a charwoman and has the manners of a butcher’s wife to whom rationing has given the upper hand. . . .’

  Felix squawked with delight, elated by Mrs Ellis’s candour. Miss Bohun had spoken of the Radletts with respect, telling Felix that the fact she was, once a year or so, invited to their house showed she ranked in their view with persons of senior grade. When Mrs Ellis spoke he suddenly, with the instinct of youth, of a creature with unblemished eyes, recognised truth, truth, truth, and he knew that truth was the thing he wanted.

  Gazing at her, adoring her, he said: ‘You’re smashing. You’re the most smashing person I know. I wish you’d marry me.’

  She smiled as though he were joking.

  ‘But,’ he pursued her, ‘you’re only five or six years older than me. Lots of people marry people six years older. . . .’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said vaguely, and no argument would persuade her to give the matter more consideration than that.

  Now he suffered moments of desolation, thinking they would be sent home on separate ships, that when she was in London and he in Somerset they would almost never meet, perhaps never meet—It was beyond thinking that a time could come when they would never meet again, but he had experienced her indifference. He knew she would make no effort to keep in touch with him. She would never stay anywhere for long. He felt the quality of her as something drifting, almost intangible so that he felt a need to keep close to her; when with her he would cling to her arm if she let him, but usually she shook him off. At times she showed her impatience with him or, half as a joke, half as a statement of fact, would describe him to the others as ‘my shadow’, or ‘the limpet’. He would have painful clairvoyant moments in which he knew that to Mrs Ellis he was rather more a nuisance than not, and when they separated she might feel relief. But those were only moments, for she treated him with tolerance and good nature and perhaps felt for his youth a certain pity. Whenever she went to the hospital he would go with her and, while waiting for her, he would visit Mr Jewel. One afternoon as they left he remembered to tell her about Mr Jewel’s paintings. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘Mr Jewel is an artist, and he’s terribly good!’