The Old Boys

by William Trevor

  But Mr Turtle had just been to see a re-issue of Random Harvest. It brought back the war to him, the ins and outs of emotional entanglements and the setting off by train for the front. He had seen it through twice and had watched the opening scenes once again. He emerged with a headache, feeling shaky in the legs and syrupy all over. Over a cup of tea in the cinema restaurant he tried to straighten himself out. He took a pill, ate two pieces of bread, and tried to convince himself that he was feeling quite gay: he drummed his fingers on the table-cloth, humming a tune. He would telephone Cridley and Sole and see if he might visit them at the Rimini. The journey would waste an hour or so and they were always quite refreshing, the things they said. He remembered Cridley using a terrible obscenity once in the washroom, and that little fat clergyman who was the Housemaster overheard him and thrashed him, as he stood there in his pelt, with everyone watching. The little fat clergyman was always thrashing people when they did or said something wrong in the washroom. Years later there had been some scandal when a couple of Old Boys returned and thrashed the little fat clergyman.

  Mr Turtle made his way out of the restaurant. A waitress ran after him to explain that he hadn’t paid for his tea. He gave her the money and went on his way to telephone the Rimini.

  ‘It is scarcely a month,’ complained Miss Burdock, ‘since those frightful women came here with corsets. And now a man with central heating. You can guess what I am going to say to you, both of you: if there is further trouble I shall be obliged to ask you to leave the Rimini.’

  ‘A genuine misunderstanding, Miss Burdock, a genuine error.’

  ‘I could easily fill your rooms. There is a waiting list for the Rimini.’

  ‘Now now, let us not be hasty.’

  ‘Let you not be hasty, Mr Cridley. Nor you, Mr Sole. You escape with a warning, but make no mistake –’ The words hung ominously in the air. Miss Burdock, like a monument driven by some propulsion outside its nature, sailed from the sun-lounge. Mr Sole and Mr Cridley returned to their newspapers.

  ‘Free trial,’ said Mr Sole. ‘Send no money. Retain for ten days, return if not delighted.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Transistor Company of Great Britain. A wireless set.’

  ‘You know, I have it in my mind to get in touch with Harp. We might arrange to meet him outside somewhere and have a drink. I was keenly interested in what he had to say for himself –’

  ‘Take care, take care. We must not offend the threatening manageress.’

  ‘We must not nothing. We are free, white and over twenty-one. Burdock has gone hysterical.’

  ‘I know, I know. But she can soon have us out on the street.’

  ‘Nonsense. If we meet Harp in the quiet seclusion of some bar, what harm is there in that? If we meet him as a friend what can Burdock do?’

  ‘Still, care should guide us.’

  ‘So it shall be. I shall telephone Harp and arrange a conference. I’ll tell you what,’ Mr Cridley added, leaning forward and lowering his voice, ‘it’s this hot weather that’s affecting Burdock. You understand how disastrous a run of heat can be for the ageing virgin?’

  7

  The cat Monmouth, feathers adhering to its jaws, strode possessively through the french windows and sought what it might destroy. Its single eye gleamed voraciously, passed from carpet to cushions, over stacked-up magazines and Mrs Jaraby’s knitting basket, stared at its own reflection on the empty television screen, lighted on the smooth fabric of the curtains and stretched out an exploratory claw. The curtains slid away beneath the pressure and the cat humped its back. In anger the claws stabbed at the carpet, and Monmouth, baring a massive jaw, snarled at the tufts of wool.

  ‘Oh puss, puss,’ cried Mr Jaraby, ‘what disorder is this?’ He smote the cat heavily on the rump, for although he was fond of it and enjoyed its company, his sense of discipline did not permit this ravaging of his property. Monmouth leapt across the room, spitting and screeching. ‘No, my puss, it will not do. We must mend our ways. We must bend to the greater authority.’ Mr Jaraby dropped to his knees and effected a perfunctory repair on the carpet, stuffing the strands of wool into his pocket since he did not wish to dispose of them immediately. He sat at his bureau, and Monmouth in a faithful way lay beneath his chair. As was his wont, Mr Jaraby spoke to himself.

  ‘She takes no care to purchase goods at the right time and in the right condition. I have myself to see to the vegetables and fruit. She will not stand up to the shop people and say: “Split the produce in half that I may see inside.” How else to know if an apple or a grapefruit is worth its money? I get the better of the shop people; why cannot she? It is all embarrassing. She will not see a doctor. A doctor would give her tablets. She should have sedatives day and night; no one can come to the house without noticing that something is amiss. This wild talk. No one could stand this talk. Did Cridley and Sole not note it and shake their heads? Do they not perhaps discuss it and pity me in my distress? They will say it, all of them soon: “Jaraby’s wife knows sanity no more.” They may condemn me even for not having her seen to or taken away, yet my hands are tied; I can do nothing, since she will recognize no shortcomings in herself. There was madness in that family, her mother had staring eyes, her father drank. There was a lad at school hanged himself from a tree. I never knew till Dowse revealed the truth and put me on my oath to hold it to myself. They gave it out he had fallen from the branch, these things are better under cover. Dowse was the wisest man I ever knew. I tell you, she brings groceries to the house that I have forbidden here. And now she calls for her son.’

  ‘She calls and he shall come,’ said Mrs Jaraby, entering the room. ‘He comes to tea on Sunday.’

  ‘So you have told me. Not once but many times. You must be humoured. I will receive my son in kindness to you only. My feelings remain. You know the truth and cannot face it.’

  ‘I know the truth and do not have to face it. I faced it in the past. I accept the consequences of your actions. Have I an option?’

  ‘You are wandering in your mind.’

  ‘My mind is a sounder possession than it has ever been. I think clearly and I know what is to be.’

  ‘You sit before the television with the sound turned off. Tell me now that that is not a nonsense. Is that a healthy mind in a healthy body?’

  ‘Oh, these awful tags you use! What is the meaning of that phrase and how can it apply to me? My mind has survived my body. I am grateful for that if for nothing else.’

  ‘You have a roof above your head to be grateful for. You have every comfort in this house. What pleasure can you get from voiceless faces on a screen?’

  ‘You do not hear the sound because your ears are less sharp than mine. I do not like everything at an unnatural pitch.’

  ‘A doctor would set you right. A doctor would give you tablets to clear your confusion.’

  ‘You are a hypochondriac on my behalf.’

  ‘I have the evidence of my eyes and ears.’

  ‘Unreliable organs, dimmed by time. Beware of what a doctor might say of you.’

  ‘You are being malicious because my thrust has struck home. I have all my faculties about me. How else do I hold my position on the committee, in busy communication with thousands?’

  ‘Your trouble is the faculties themselves, not the loss of them. Your cat has damaged the carpet. Soon there will be nothing left of this house. He has eaten wallpaper and may yet attack us as we sleep.’

  ‘Monmouth is an old and gentle thing, seeing out his days. He would not harm a living thing.’

  ‘He harms the birds, he is feared by local dogs. Have a stout cage constructed that he may see out his days in some less gruesome way.’

  ‘You pick on an innocent cat! Your cold nature cannot endure a pet that might be a comfort to me.’

  ‘My cold nature cannot endure a pet that may slay us in our beds.’

  ‘That is wild talk again. Have you heard of such a thing, a cat responsible for such an act? H
ow can you speak so irrelevantly?’

  ‘Monmouth is the kind to set a precedent. It would be a rich end for us both, we would feature in Sunday papers!’

  ‘Leave death alone. You talk of death and dying all day long. Can you not imagine what it’s like to hear a woman speak of death from morning till night? Have you no perception?’

  ‘I spoke lightly. But your cat eyes me jealously. He would like the flesh off my bones! My jest may yet reverse itself on me.’

  ‘I have simple ways. I cannot continue with this kind of thing. I came here to read through Basil’s school reports and such letters as there were at the time.’

  ‘Basil is grown by now. It is not yesterday. Basil is forty.’

  ‘I am aware of it. Who more than I should know that Basil has lived that long? The forty years have not been free from trouble, you know.’

  ‘Why bring up school reports? What significance have they now?’

  ‘They lead us into his character and may be a subject for conversation when we face the awkward occasion.’

  ‘You have not seen your son for fifteen years and you propose a discussion of his school reports! Who is being irrelevant now?’

  ‘I regret that I mentioned this. My perusal of the reports is merely to refresh my memory. Cannot you see that I am doing my best to meet you half-way over this? I want to think the whole thing out in retrospect; to view our son’s life and crimes and see how the picture looks proportionately thus. Do you not follow my simple reasoning?’

  ‘You could ask me, I would tell you. It does not take school reports and thinking out to find the truth.’

  ‘Why should I ask you? Since in this, as in most matters, your opinion is unreliable. Why should I waste my time, listening to you and picking out once in a mile of talk what is of the least value? I prefer to go on my own way.’

  ‘To start with the schooldays and not the reports might get you somewhere. But in fact you must cover previous ground, before the schooldays. Come to those days in their time, assess their damage fairly. View the case-history objectively, not as a father.’

  ‘You offer advice where none is asked. How can I examine the facts except as a father? Since I am the father.’

  ‘Then take responsibility as a father. Do not play hide-and-seek with the issues. Basil should never have gone to that school.’

  ‘I did not hear you right.’

  ‘You did. But I can easily repeat what I said.’

  ‘Why should he not? Let us have what is at the back of this. What harm did the School do him? Remember I went there too.’

  ‘I am unlikely to forget that. Put your question another way: what good did it do him?’

  ‘It made – it opened the world for him.’

  ‘It made a man of him? You do not think so. It opened the world for him is devoid of meaning.’

  ‘The School showed him the way. He could have moved in any direction.’

  ‘You are adopting an odd turn of phrase. What you say is a string of clichés.’

  ‘You blame the School? You blame his alma mater for subsequent sins? Be careful, woman, you will say more than you can justify.’

  ‘In which case you will win the argument, and then at least one person in this room will be satisfied. Like your cat, who sleeps well-gorged beneath you.’

  ‘You are away from the point. Stick to what we are discussing. Or is Monmouth, too, an implement in Basil’s downfall?’

  ‘What an absurd suggestion! How could a cat have anything to do with this? That school was not wholly to blame. Say it finished what already had been well begun.’

  ‘I will not say that. I do not understand it. My School was good enough for me, why not for Basil? He did not shine there, I grant you that. He rose to no great heights, he won no prizes. Was that the School’s fault?’

  ‘He was afraid of the place. It was you who rose to great heights and won the prizes. He was to do likewise. He tried, God knows, but a frightened child can achieve little.’

  ‘Woman’s talk! You have the unhealthy relationship that women have too often with their sons.’

  ‘We do our best. We are made as mothers. We cannot help ourselves.’

  ‘Why should the boy have been frightened? What was there to frighten him? I was not frightened; why should he have been?’

  ‘He was another person, brought up in other circumstances. Your own ghost was at that school. And you were here at home. What chance had he to escape?’

  ‘You are attempting to undermine me, to bring me low. There are veiled insults in every word you speak. You have nothing to say and you make up nonsense as you go along. You should see a doctor. When Basil comes I shall bring this up. He will be sorry to see you in this state. The School is five hundred years old; its sons have distinguished every walk of life. Yet irresponsibly you refer to it as though it were some worthless, crackpot place. I would remind you that I am shortly to become President of the Old Boys’ Association of the very school you malign. Such disloyalty is obnoxious; and, if I knew the law, might well give me a case for having you put away. I ask for silence.’

  ‘Ask for it you may, but have it you shall not. There is a threat in what you say. It is a rubbishy threat and I choose to ignore it. Do not lock yourself within yourself. See yourself from beyond, as other people see you. Change shoes with them occasionally. You shall have your silence now. You need not worry about what I say. I have been speaking academically: it is too late to speak in any other way.’

  The silence fell, and it was Mr Jaraby who broke it. In his reading he had come upon passages he could not help quoting.

  ‘Biology. A studious pupil, thoughtful and interested. Well, that is something; that shows promise, I think. And this in the same report: Geography. Maps, excellent. A good term for Master Basil. Alas, all of a sudden we have dropped off. French. Idle and lackadaisical. He makes no effort. Algebra. He shows no evidence that he has grasped even the elements of this subject. Very uneven, up and down like a jack-in-the-box. Here’s Latin Composition the following term: First-class work. He has applied himself assiduously all term. History. Quite good. Not a dunce, you know. By no means. Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes, I am listening.’

  ‘Dear Mr Jaraby, Basil’s Housemaster has had occasion to inform me that your son’s present attitude is causing him some little concern. Your son persists in a disobedience which, while concerned with a mere detail of school routine, is nevertheless a disobedience. He has been punished no less than eight times on this count, sometimes quite strictly. I have caned him myself and spoken severely to the boy, but I now learn that the trouble still persists. I would ask you, Mr Jaraby, to speak to your son about this matter during the holidays. I need hardly say it would go against the grain to have to ask for the removal of the son of an Old Boy, but I trust and am confident that it will not come to that. Yours sincerely, J. A. Furneaux. P.S. The trouble has something to do with pouring plates of porridge behind the radiators in Dining Hall. I remember that. My God, I remember that letter. I never felt so ashamed in my life.’

  Mr Jaraby continued to look through his papers, dozed for a while and awoke with a sniff.

  ‘She ruined the boy. She should see a doctor and have done with it. She’s a damned nuisance.’ He spoke to himself, although his wife was still in the room.

  8

  Basil came to tea at Crimea Road, but the occasion was not a successful one. Basil was silent, listening to his parents in turn, agreeing by gesture, nodding and smiling a bit. His eyes seemed drowsy, reflected twice in the thick lenses of his spectacles. He is taking drugs now, thought Mr Jaraby; and bit back the inclination to accuse his son thus. Mrs Jaraby was worried mainly by the condition of Basil’s clothes. He wore a striped suit with a waistcoat, of a heavy cloth that made no concession to the weather. Here and there it was burnt and marked, and seemed generally to be dirty. Dandruff clung to its collar and lapels, bird-seed in small patches to waistcoat and trousers. As well, Basil wore boots.
They were army boots of rudimentary design, black and unpolished, surplus stock he had bought for a pound. ‘Do you eat enough?’ Mrs Jaraby asked, offering him rock cakes. There was an unhealthiness about his plump face, and she remembered his lung trouble as a child. How could this man be the baby she had nursed? How could the crinkled body have grown so swiftly to this? Had he, she wondered, been real as a child, learning to speak, teething and falling over, or was he real now, middle-aged and shuffling before his time? The line that connected the two images faded and was gone: for all she knew, the man who ate her rock cakes might be an impostor. ‘Your mother is addled in her mind,’ Mr Jaraby said when she had left the room. ‘I urge her to seek the attention of an expert but …’ He made a hopeless gesture with his arms. Basil seemed to be thinking of something else.

  Mr Jaraby had referred to the school reports and had spoken at length of the Old Boys’ committee. During all this his wife had shifted impatiently, sighing and uttering short cries. She attempted, while her husband spoke, to engage Basil in a separate conversation.

  ‘Are you happy?’ Mrs Jaraby asked as he left, when her husband had already made his farewells and was watering plants in the garden. ‘Are you happy where you live and in what you do?’

  ‘Happy?’ He spoke as though he questioned the meaning of the word, as though he might draw a dictionary from his pocket to check or confirm its connotation.

  ‘Are you happy, Basil, in your life now? Would you care to live with us here? Would that be easier for you?’

  ‘I have my birds. I am happy looking after them.’

  ‘You would not have to cook or make your bed. You would not have to clean and dust. Your old room is as you left it. Sheets and blankets in the airing cupboard.’

  ‘It is kind of you.’