Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  ‘The young lady in question was Shirley – you know, from Vlaminck’s, the bookshop.’

  ‘Bookshop? I don’t think I know her. Shirley. Well, at least somebody’s happy.’ Maggie looked at me impatiently.

  ‘She’s very young. She’s my age.’

  ‘Must run in the family, then, cradle-snatching. Honestly, who cares? As long as she’s old enough to vote, which according to you she is.’

  ‘She’s a friend of mine, actually.’

  ‘A friend?’ Maggie’s tone made this sound like a dubious idea. ‘Men don’t have female “friends”, do they?’

  ‘I used to go out with her. Now we’re friends.’

  ‘Commendable.’

  For some reason I had hoped to gain an advantage by revealing this acquaintance, by placing myself at the centre of some imagined sphere of relations. Instead I seemed to be diminished, browbeaten by the older woman who had come here in search of me.

  ‘Charles has odd tastes,’ Maggie added. ‘I mean, he’s not a snob about that kind of thing.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Let’s not dwell on it, shall we?’

  I decided to cut my losses.

  ‘I’m here with Smallbone. He’ll be back in a minute. We’re off into town.’

  She finished her drink and lit another cigarette. ‘Looking for mucky women.’ Her attempt at the local vernacular was jarring and somehow hateful.

  ‘I dare say Smallbone will be. I thought I might be spoken for myself, but it seems not, Mrs Rowan.’

  Her expression softened a degree. ‘I knew you’d be here. I mean, you usually are.’ She paused. ‘The thing is, Robert was supposed to be coming home this weekend, but now it turns out he won’t be. So, anyway.’

  ‘It’s probably not wise. This doesn’t count as discretion, does it?’

  She bristled at this. I wondered if she might strike me.

  ‘I know that, Stephen. You need hardly tell me. But there you are. I’ll be at the flat.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Let yourself in. Up to you, of course.’

  I wondered if I had just managed to exercise power, albeit of a low and perhaps contemptible order.

  Stan Pitt appeared again, wiping a glass with a clean tea towel.

  ‘How is Mr Rowan?’ he asked. ‘We used to see him now and again in here in the holidays.’

  ‘Making progress, I think, Stan,’ Maggie said. ‘We’re looking on the bright side.’

  ‘That’s good, Mrs Rowan. We look forward to welcoming him back.’ Maggie gathered her things and left without looking at me. Stan went on polishing the glass. I wondered if it might simply disappear under his attentions.

  ‘Stan, you know those two in the snug, Claes and his pal?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye. What about them?’

  ‘Any trouble at all?’

  Now he looked up. ‘None at all so far, Mr Maxwell. All they do in here is drink and talk. Just like you and Mrs Rowan.’

  ‘Don’t usually see Mr Rackham in here.’

  ‘That’s not for me to say, Mr Maxwell.’ He went through into the bar.

  At last Smallbone reappeared.

  ‘I know what you’re do-ing,’ he sang, with sweaty glee. ‘Knocked you back, has she?’

  ‘Be quiet, Bone.’

  ‘Smallbone, like the night, has a thousand eyes. She looked keen, the lady who wasn’t here.’

  ‘You have a mind like a sewer.’

  ‘Then at least I know where my interests lie.’

  In due course Smallbone and I walked into town, drinking steadily, avoiding the agreed haunts of the boys as they avoided ours. Eventually we came to the Triton, an ancient and disreputable boozer near the pier. The lights on the far bank glinted distantly and there were ships leaving on the evening tide. There was a folk club in a back room of the pub, the kind of thing I could take or leave, while the front offered an explosive mixture of blue-suited trawlermen home for three days on the lash, local criminals and bohemians, and girls of uncertain provenance, whose charms tended, as the evening wore on, to provoke conflict between the fishermen and those they viewed as layabouts. It was not a wise place for the casual visitor. You could be stabbed for looking. And yet we went there: it was life, albeit occasionally fatal.

  On the way back from the Gents I looked in through the door of the Singing Room. Some fisherman’s jersey-clad fraud of a liberal studies lecturer from the Tech was doing ‘The Irish Rover’. In a nearby street there stood a golden equestrian statue of William of Orange in Roman attire. Its gold was painted green the night before every twelfth of July. It was 1968, year of revolution, so this must have been ours.

  Smallbone seemed to be in luck that night. When I returned he was sitting with a pair of ferociously backcombed twins in crocheted white minidresses. They were all drunk by now, and there seemed to be a move afoot to go on to the Club Lithuania, destination of many a journey to the end of the night, a frowsty knocking shop where violence was even more prevalent than in the Triton. I left Smallbone and his companions at the door of the club. It was guarded by two polite but terrifying Ghanaian bouncers, former merchant seamen who were rumoured to have sold the dismembered parts of an enemy for dogfood. They also discreetly supplied grass and uppers.

  ‘Stamina,’ said Smallbone. ‘You lack stamina. Having a proper job makes you weak. You need to dabble more and waste time properly.’ His companions roared with laughter and dragged him inside.

  I began to walk back past the late bus queues in the centre of town, knowing that it would not be until I reached the Cenotaph that I would have to make a decision. It had grown foggy, and the bell of a lightship sounded faintly across the roofs, a reminder of the vast, agreeable cold of the estuary and the ocean a few miles downstream.

  The Cenotaph loomed, the great slab in emulation of the Lutyens in Whitehall, remembering the mass slaughter of the local regiment on the Somme. Beyond this to one side stood the smaller monument to the Boer War, with its two stone soldiers, one crouching as though to reload, the other standing and taking aim across the marble slab from which they grew.

  I stopped and lit a cigarette. Which way, then? To have become involved like this was dangerous, to put it mildly. To continue would surely guarantee disaster. There were, I told myself, no secrets in this place, not in the school, not in the city. But I already knew where I was going, didn’t I?

  There must have been pain, disappointment, tragedy and madness in the years covered in A Firm Foundation, Carson’s first volume of school history. Yet beyond some benign comments on the demeanour of leading members of staff, usually couched in comparison with Roman generals (was Carson being satirical? ‘Our rivals at the Grammar School must be destroyed,’ etc.), it was not the kind of work to admit much personal detail or any but the mildest eccentricity. The school was a repertory theatre which never closed: the show should be reliable, efficient and traditional, and offer no disturbing surprises. Discretion was extraordinarily powerful. But there were limits, presumably, people sent away, gone in the night, no longer spoken of. I was in a fair way to join them if I carried on, and it wasn’t even the end of the autumn term yet.

  Beyond the new buildings on the edge of the town centre lay areas of merchant housing which had already gone to seed before the war, substantial terraces interspersed with bombsites that had joined up with back gardens run wild. The population was a mixture of the transient (students and the restless poor, the latter always flitting), the old, a few medical and dental practices, along with people who seemed immune to change and never moved out to the suburbs. Percival Street offered all these elements. It ended at the gate of a pedestrian railway crossing to a patch of allotments, from which another crossing led to the scrubland behind the grounds of Blake’s. All in all, it was very handy.

  I walked past the house down to the gate and leaned there looking into the fog. A goods train crawled past. The beer was wearing off. It wasn’t too late to go home. I could risk crossing the foggy tracks and cu
t through Blake’s and be in my own bed in ten minutes, reading The End of the Affair. It was time to put a stop to this business, but that had been true since the minute before it began. I looked up at the top floor of the end house. A light was showing. Up to you, Maggie had said.

  TEN

  At the end of the previous school year the garden party was held, culminating in the school summer play, a fund-raising event including dinner and champagne. Wives, girlfriends and female staff were enlisted to take part, sew, cook and so on (a different era, it is alleged). It was in some ways the highlight of the social calendar, along with the cricket match between the staff and the First Eleven. Having no other urgent occupation, and preparing to take up my post at Blake’s in September, I was pressed by Connolly to help with scene-painting and fetching and carrying. He alluded to my earlier turn as Banquo as evidence of an addiction to greasepaint. Maggie Rowan, lust-object of most of the pupil population, taught art and was in charge of designing the set for the play.

  Last summer it had been A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so the Athenian woods sprang up on the stage of the Memorial Hall and the foolish mortals went through their immortal paces for the amusement of their supernatural betters. The production was, as always, well received. It signalled that summer was here in earnest. The Lord of Misrule momentarily got a foot in the door of Blake’s: Titania, courtesy of St Clare’s, was undoubtedly sexy. Feldberg and his girl, in evening dress, played the dud piano in the interval when drinks were served by sixth formers from both schools.

  There was a party afterwards onstage for the cast and production team, and it would be fair to say that some of those present drank more than they would normally wish to be seen or known to do. The senior staff had long departed by the time the action wound down. Maggie took charge, ushered out the stragglers – the fairies and nobles and mechanicals bound for Connolly’s house nearby – and said she would lock up. I found myself delegated to remain behind and help.

  A little later I was tipsily carrying several bags of costumes and a bottle of wine past School House, where boarders lived, around the edge of the moonlit field, through the woods and over the railway line to the big attic flat on Percival Street. It must have been an enchantment: I was incapable of resisting.

  Maggie kept the place as a studio, she explained, and for storage. It was convenient and quiet and, besides, there was no room for her to work at the Headmaster’s House in the grounds, which is where I first imagined we were heading, and there were always interruptions, which made it such a nuisance that Robert had not felt able to break with tradition and live off-site, but there we were.

  By this time we were going up the stairs of the tall end-terrace. Incredulous, I watched her slim, tanned legs flickering ahead in a skirt that would have been generally considered an inch too short for someone of her age in her position. I was doing it again. I watched myself doing it – climbing the stairs towards an irrevocable act, and at any of those thirty-odd steps I could have stopped and gone away, but I didn’t. At heart perhaps I was already ruined and wanted to make sure by destroying the second chance I had been offered. It was a kind of punishment, I told myself, as Maggie dumped the bags of costumes and unzipped her skirt. It was punishment. I had only to wait and see.

  When I woke, it was five a.m., still dark, the fog thicker at the window. My head ached with dehydration. Maggie was moving about in a blue kimono, a cigarette in her mouth, pouring brandy into two glasses.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll need it for the walk back,’ she said, placing the glass on a tea-chest by the bed. ‘By the look of you.’

  ‘Class dismissed, is it?’ I began to dress.

  ‘When you come down to it, discretion is the only thing,’ she said. She looked older now.

  ‘I take it you’re discreet, then.’

  She nodded. Now she was staring consideringly at one of the paintings stacked along the wall. ‘I certainly hope you are.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have done it, should we?’

  ‘No, we shouldn’t. Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ I gave what I thought was a trawlerman’s leer. ‘You being the colonel’s lady, as it were.’

  ‘I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for Rosie O’Grady, myself.’

  I’m not the first, am I? I thought. But I didn’t mind. It was an adventure. It was everything I was supposed to be avoiding. It was important, like doom, like fate, like destiny and all those other things the likes of me did not possess. I joined her and looked at the painting. It was like a view of the school minus the buildings. It seemed slightly anachronistic, a Thirties or Forties romantic landscape, a daylight moon over a gold field beside a birchwood gathered at a pool, where the chalky moon was faintly reflected. Everything was slightly bleached, as if austerity had requisitioned the natural world too.

  ‘It’s good. A little reminiscent of Paul Nash,’ I said, and bit my tongue.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘I didn’t mean it as a criticism.’

  ‘No, I know.’ She moved away. ‘Of course not. You have a good eye. It’s just one more turn of the key. No harm done. Anyway, finish your drink. I need to get on. Can you let yourself out?’ She went through into the bathroom.

  ‘Is that it, then?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said, coming back. ‘Be careful crossing the railway.’

  But that wasn’t it.

  I expected to have to do a stint of miserable hanging about, all the time knowing I’d had an extraordinary experience that I would never be permitted to repeat and could not entirely remember. Maggie was a much more authentic older woman than the don’s wife, who had still been in her twenties and inclined to panic and send tearful letters and even turn up outside my room asking the bedder where I was. I imagined drinking a lot of beer, knocking about with Smallbone and trying to avoid the fatal mistake of telling him what had happened. But a couple of days later when I went in for a meeting with Carson about my timetable I found an envelope in my pigeonhole. At lunchtime, after the meeting, I strolled across the field and over the tracks again.

  ‘Won’t the people in the other flats notice these comings and goings?’ I asked when she opened the front door.

  ‘There’s no one else living here. I have the whole place. I need it to work.’ She was dressed for painting, in an old shirt and jeans, with her auburn hair tied back. When we got up to the attic, she indicated an upright chair by the large window. ‘Just sit there. I want to draw you. And put this on.’ She handed me a sleeveless pullover in muted autumnal colours. Even on a casual day like today she wore her dark, arterial lipstick. When she concentrated, her face became severe and remote. At the brow and the mouth and in the slant of the gaze, she had that slightly feral nobility you find among some Irish people. It was worth sitting still and being drawn, worth wearing the musty pullover, in order to be able to look at her properly. The bed lay unmade.

  Eventually, she stopped, grimaced, closed her sketchbook and poured wine.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s nothing to show at the moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry for what I said before. I did like the picture. I mean, I admired it.’

  ‘I don’t remember whatever it was you said. What picture was that?’

  ‘The landscape with the moon and the pool.’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t ring any bells. Anyway, never mind. You can take the jersey off now. And can you put the kettle on? There’s some milk left, I think.’

  She lit a cigarette and stood looking out of the window across the tracks to the school. The weathercock glinted faintly above the stopped clock on the Main Hall tower. It was one of those flat white summer days typical of the city. A shunter moved slowly along the tracks below.

  ‘Why do you teach?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t look as if you need the money. You could just concentrate on your own work.’

  Maggie sniffed. ‘What? Well, why does one
do anything? It’s what one does. It’s something to do. It keeps the days ticking over, I suppose. The school finds it useful and it keeps me in touch with the school. No children of my own, of course. Not that I wanted them, though Robert did.’

  I poured the tea and took it over.

  ‘But you’re obviously serious about painting.’

  She made an impatient grimace. ‘Oh, serious. Absolutely. And much good it does me.’

  ‘Maggie, I’m not sure what’s going on here.’

  ‘I suppose it depends what you want, Stephen.’

  ‘I want to go to bed with you again.’

  ‘If that’s all, then that’s all right. A fuck is OK, isn’t it?’ Her use of the word shocked me a little, and she smiled at my surprise. ‘Anything more would be out of the question, wouldn’t it?’ I didn’t entirely follow this. ‘But of course, anything at all is very risky. We’re already being very stupid, or I am, leading a young man into temptation and so on. Especially one with your record.’ I stared. ‘Well, of course I know about that. I’m the Headmaster’s wife – I know lots of things. People’s susceptibilities and so on. But if that’s what you want. If you’re prepared to take the risk. Visit me here and I’ll let you fuck me. All right?’

  ‘What about the – your husband?’

  ‘My husband is ill. Robert is ill.’ She looked tired now. It was generally understood that the Head’s ill health would keep him away for the foreseeable future. ‘He’s not at home. He’s there sometimes, but not for long.’

  ‘Will he recover?’

  ‘They say we should be optimistic. But they have to say such things. Otherwise, who knows, I might end up as mad as he is.’ This was the rumour, that the Head’s illness was not leukaemia but something psychiatric instead or as well. No matter how discreet people were, no matter if no one said anything, rumour would find a way. ‘What with one thing and another, I’ve had my moments.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t concern you, does it?’

  ‘I’m just saying I sympathize.’

  ‘With Robert because he’s mad and you’re fucking his wife? That’s very sophisticated. Sounds like Graham Greene to me.’