by Phillip Rock
Charles poured himself another glass, noting with satisfaction that his hand did not tremble. How amber the wine … how clean and nutty dry. There had been one bottle left in his kit and he had poured it into the tin mugs of his platoon officers before the Delville Wood show where most of them had died. Good school fellows all. Eton. Harrow. Sherborne and Malvern. A Catholic lad from Downside. A jocular little Scot a year out of Glenalmond who used to sing in the mess after a whisky or two …
O, safe with thy soldiers up-grown
is thy honour, high Queen of the Glen,
And the battle shall seal them thine
Glenalmond, right mother of men!
… and who had died on the wire like a gutted pig. He moistened his dry lips.
“I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Ramsay. I know what you’re saying and I know how strongly you believe it. I was in the war … the Royal Windsors. I’m well acquainted with the type of man the public schools bred. They were indeed brave, but many were both brave and foolish. The young subalterns of the Surreys who kicked a football across no-man’s-land at the Somme and died doing so felt they were setting an example of coolness and bravery for their men. They would have better served their regiment and their king by crawling across on their bellies and not being shot to pieces by machine guns.”
Ramsay scowled, drained his glass, and held it out for refilling. “You are quite right in that respect, sir. I won’t argue the point. My own Tom was in the marines and he told me of many foolish acts of bravery on the part of fellow officers that served no purpose other than death at an early age. As a banker I revere caution. The junior officers of Drayton’s Bank crawl on their bellies when under fire or, by God, I know the reason why they don’t! This is an excellent sherry, by the way.”
“Yes. It was given time—and patience—to age.”
“Well put. But boys are not sherries. They go green into the world and are taught to become mellow and palatable. Notwithstanding the kicking of footballs into machine guns, I believe the public schools teach their lessons well.”
“They teach some boys well … those that fit. Your grandson appears to be intelligent, but … at this stage of his life anyway … seems to be a square peg, and no amount of hammering is going to squeeze him into a round hole.”
“I’m not a believer in square pegs, Lord Amberley. Hammer hard enough and anything will fit. I don’t mean to be ungracious. I’m glad that Derek fell into your hands and not some roving band of gypsies as it were, but dash it all, sir, I can’t go along with this so-called progressive school nonsense. I believe it panders to a child’s proclivity to anarchy and self-gratification. My grandson is spoiled enough as it is, for reasons I need not go into. He needs solid guidelines and discipline.” He set his glass on the table and turned toward the door. “Be so kind as to give my regards to Lord Stanmore.”
And that was that. Derek Ramsay, still half asleep, was led to the car and driven away. Five days later he was back.
4
HE DID NOT hide in the orchard this time but came panting and puffing up the drive, footsore and weary after the five-mile walk from Abingdon station. Valerie A’Dean-Spender, running an errand for the soviet, was the first to spot him.
“Hello, Fat Chap!” she called out cheerily. “What brings you back?” She fell into step beside him. She was nine and small for her age. Her bright yellow hair cut in an Eton crop made her look like a delicate boy. “Run away again?”
“None of your business,” he muttered.
“They’ll only drag you back. I’d run off to sea if I were you.” She skipped ahead of him. “Do you like cream buns and jam tarts? That’s what we’re having for tea.” She raced ahead toward the front door, shouting back over her shoulder, “I’ll save you some, Fat Chap … really I will.”
It was a different boy who faced Charles in his study. No cowering into a chair now. He stood stiff-backed, chubby and resolute, hands balled into pudgy little fists at his sides. His school uniform was reasonably neat and unstained.
“I shall never go back to Archdean,” he said with stubborn intensity. “Never.”
Charles tilted back in his chair and tapped the end of a pencil against the rim of the desk. “You may well get your wish. I’d be greatly surprised if you’re not expelled. But you can’t stay here, Ramsay.”
“Why can’t I? I like it here.”
“That’s hardly the point. You have no say in the matter.”
“It’s not fair.”
“It may not be fair, but it is fact. Come by train again?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m surprised you were allowed pocket money, given your propensity for flight.”
“They never look in my shoe.”
“Care to tell me what drove you into exodus this time?”
He had not been beaten—there had hardly been time for it. He had been kept home for four days, to pull himself together and to be lectured on his “moral responsibilities,” and then taken back to the school that Monday morning. His grandfather had spent half an hour talking with the headmaster and then had been driven away in the back of his shiny black Daimler to attend a business conference in Bristol. The car had been barely out of sight when he had walked from the school grounds, caught a bus going into Chippenham, and had taken the train from there. He had simply made up his mind to leave the school once and for all.
“Do you really think I’ll be expelled, sir?”
“I’d say there was little doubt of it, unless your grandfather owns the place. You seem to have spent more time in railway carriages than you ever did in classrooms.” He leaned forward and reached for the telephone. “What’s your number at home?”
“I won’t be missed at school until assembly at supper. And grandfather is on business. He won’t be home until Thursday.”
“There must be someone there I can talk to. The number, please.”
“Roehampton … nine … three … five.” He put a hand to his mouth and chewed a fingernail.
“Don’t do that,” Charles snapped. “It’s a disgusting habit.”
“I can’t help it.” The hand returned to his side.
“Of course you can. Just put your mind to it.” He noticed the door to the corridor open a crack. “Is that you, Valerie?”
The door inched wide enough to frame her tiny face. “Yes, sir, Mr. Greville.”
“Don’t skulk about.”
“I was just waiting. Everyone’s going to tea and I thought …”
“Very well, go and have your tea and take Ramsay along with you.”
She smiled broadly and flung the door wide. “Come along, Fat Chap. Jolly good tuck today!”
“His name is Ramsay,” Charles said coldly. “Or Derek. You didn’t like it when Mary Henshaw called you Pencil Legs last term.”
“I got the sow for it!” she cried, swinging her thin arms about. “Got her good an’ proper!”
“Stop using slang. Now run along—and after your tea find Gowers and Wilson and place Derek in their care.”
A maid answered the phone at the Ramsay house, asked him to wait and put on a Mrs. Daintree who did not sound in the least surprised at what Charles told her.
“I said right along this would happen.” She had an ancient voice, cracked and quavering. “He has no one to blame but himself. As the twig is bent the tree will grow. Told him … but would he pay any mind to me? I wash my hands of it. He’ll be staying at the George Hotel in Bristol. He always does. The George, mind … and he won’t be pleased, I can tell you.”
Charles had poured a glass of sherry and was standing by the window drinking when Marian Halliday came into the room.
“Our wayward wanderer is back again, I see.”
“Yes, and there’ll be the devil to pay now, I’m afraid. We’ll probably be blamed for exerting undue influence on the lad, or something like that. I placed a call to his grandfather … in Bristol.”
“Anything I can do?”
“A touc
h of moral support.” He stared morosely out at the garden. “I wish he’d never heard of Burgate House. Why didn’t he run away to Summerhill?”
Marian laughed and walked over to him. “You should feel flattered that he preferred us. Just think what a reporter could do with all this … bullied and whipped little tyke determined to seek kindness and safety in Surrey progressive school … that sort of thing. Center section of the Sunday Post. Complete with photographs.”
He swallowed some sherry. “God forbid.”
“I’m sure the publicity would result in a flood of donations.”
“You sound like Simpson.”
“Well, we do think alike in that respect.”
“I don’t believe in soliciting. This is not a home for orphans.”
She gestured toward the sherry decanter. “Mind if I help myself? I hate to see anyone drink alone.”
“I am sorry. I forgot my manners.” He set his glass down and poured one for her. “This Ramsay business is upsetting. He belongs in a school like this, but I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What can you do? It’s not your fault if the boy has an idée fixe. All you can do is turn him over again and hope for the best. And by the way, I wish to apologize for my attitude last week. I was overwrought. It’s not like me.”
“Cool and collected.”
“I try to be. I used to have a vile temper when I was married to Gerald … but then he had a peculiar talent for bringing it out.”
He knew so little about her. Not much more in fact than the bare particulars … age thirty-one … divorced … no children … educated at the London School of Art and Design … seven years with the Old Vic. Of her life away from the school he knew nothing. Simpson and some of the other teachers had been to her cottage a mile or so from Abingdon, but he had not. She owned a huge ginger cat named Tartuffe which she brought to the school occasionally where it would follow her about like a dog and permit itself to be petted by all the children. A popular and vivacious woman—and certainly an attractive one with her red hair, green eyes, and slim, lissome body. Any number of suitors, he was thinking … although they were probably called “boyfriends” these days.
The telephone rang—a harsh, persistent sound.
“Him?” she asked.
“I’m rather afraid it might be, yes.” He downed his drink.
“I’ll leave you alone with his outrage.”
“No,” he said, reaching for the instrument. “Moral support, remember?”
He had a horror of confrontations and steeled himself for thunderbolts after informing T. C. of what had taken place, but there was only a painful silence for a few moments and then the man’s voice, heavy with a weary resignation …
“I appreciate your call, Greville … and for looking after the boy. Sticky business this. I can’t get away until tomorrow afternoon. Would it be putting you to too much bother to keep him overnight?”
“Not at all.”
“I feel we must have a talk and I would find it easier in my own home. I realize it’s an imposition, but if you could possibly come up to Wimbledon … any time after six tomorrow …”
“Certainly.”
“The Willows, Woodvale Road. Derek will show you the shortcuts.”
And that was the end of the conversation.
“He sounded rather abashed,” Charles said, hanging up the phone. “Wants to have a talk tomorrow … in Wimbledon. I’ll take Ramsay up. Leave here about four thirty, I expect. Not sure how long it will take me to get there.”
“Days. You’d never get past Dorking in your car and the way you drive. I’ll take you in mine.”
“I can’t ask you to do that, Mrs. Halliday.”
“You didn’t. I volunteered.”
Derek Ramsay was not happy at the thought of going home. He had enjoyed spending the night at the school and a day of attending classes. “Surprisingly well read and extremely bright,” had been Simpson’s evaluation. “He belongs here,” had been Marian Halliday’s terse assessment. Derek felt the same way.
“I don’t want to leave,” he said.
“I’m afraid you must.” The boy was looking over his shoulder as he stood beside Charles on the drive. There were children at the windows. Valerie A’Dean-Spender waving. “Are you afraid of what your grandfather is going to say to you?”
Derek chewed his lip and glanced at Charles with a worried expression. “He’ll be very angry.”
“Don’t you think he has a right to be?”
“Yes … I suppose.”
“Not everyone who goes to public school is bullied, you know. Most muddle through, or learn to get by. We expect new pupils to do their best here. We permit a certain latitude at first, a reasonable time to adjust, but our codes are as rigid in some ways as Archdean’s. We don’t tolerate students who will not at least try to live up to our standards. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” he replied with a fierce intensity. “I would try. I would.”
Charles scrutinized the boy’s face and saw a passionate determination stamped upon it. The cherubic mouth trembled, but the eyes gleamed and did not waver.
“I believe you, Ramsay. It may not come to pass, but I will do my best to have you enrolled here … that much I promise.”
It was a little over twenty miles from Burgate House to Wimbledon as the crow flies, but crows had not laid out the winding country roads. Charles had only been driving for a few years and was still not comfortable steering his little Austin around sharp curves and past the thick hedge walls that turned narrow lanes into virtual tunnels. He drove with a tense, nervous concentration soon transmitted to anyone unfortunate enough to be driving with him. Not so Marian Halliday. She steered her Rover with all the verve and nonchalance of a professional, downshifting, turning, accelerating with such easy skill that Charles, seated beside her, could not take his eyes from her.
“You do this awfully well,” he said.
“My brother taught me. He builds race cars as a hobby. I drove one of them once at Brooklands … got it up to a hundred and twenty.”
Derek bounced with excitement on the back seat. “Oh, do it now, Mrs. Halliday … please!”
She laughed. “Not on this road, Derek. We want you home in one solid piece.”
“I don’t want to go home at all,” he muttered, slumping back. “I shall only run away again.”
Charles turned and looked at him. “No, not if you ever expect to come to our school. Your running away will solve nothing. Is that clear?”
Derek looked miserably out of the window. “I wish I were dead.”
“Well, you’re not, so make the best of it.”
It was a large Victorian house on the edge of Wimbledon Common, the wooded hills of Richmond Park seen beyond its multigabled roof. A gravel drive flanked by rhododendron bushes curved to the front of the house from the street. A sign on the gatepost proclaimed it to be THE WILLOWS. Charles could not see any. Perhaps T. C. Ramsay had chopped them down.
A young maid opened the front door and Derek ran past her into the house. The maid watched him go and shook her head in wonder. “Cor! He’s really ’ad it this time.”
“Is Mr. Ramsay at home?” Charles asked.
The girl nodded in an abstract way and stepped aside. “Yes, sir. Will you follow me, please?”
She led them through a dark, wood-paneled hallway into a large room that had probably been furnished in 1900 and not altered since.
“Quaint,” Marian said, taking in the horsehair sofas, wingback chairs, and expanses of polished oak and gleaming beveled glass.
“It’s exactly the sort of place I imagined.”
“Yes. Solid and sensible. Bank of England traditional.”
A grand piano stood in a window bay, its lid covered by a lace mantle on which stood a dozen or more photographs in ornate gold or silver frames. Charles ambled over to it and studied the pictures in the pale orange light that filtered through the lace window curtains. T
here was an amber-tinted picture of a young man he assumed to be T. C. standing in front of a country inn, a pretty woman wearing a bonnet and a long dress standing beside him. There was a caption penned in white ink—Jane and myself, Highmoor Cross, July, 1898. Had Jane been his wife?
There were several photographs of his young son: wearing a straw hat and seated on a pony—Tom at Longfield Farm, Summer, 1901; standing in a boat with a punting pole in his hands, a background of willows trailing branches into the river—Tom, aged 12, Henley, 1907. And there was Thomas Ramsay through the years, growing older and taller; at prep school with a long, striped scarf wrapped around his neck; at Archdean in cricket flannels and the school cap—Archdean vs. Charterhouse, 1912. And there was a photograph of Thomas Ramsay in the uniform of a Royal Marine subaltern, an inscription scrawled in ink that had turned a rusty brown: To Father with love and respect, 15 October 1915. Two and a half years of life left to him before the raid on Zeebrugge. Dangling from the side of the frame on a faded purple ribbon was the Victoria Cross, the dull bronze medal inscribed with the simple explanation of its reward—FOR VALOUR.
There were no photographs of Derek.
T. C. Ramsay came into the room. He looked drawn and troubled, a man with a good deal on his mind. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” The sight of Marian Halliday was unexpected and seemed to brighten his outlook. He smiled at her and straightened his tie. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“Mrs. Halliday,” Marian said warmly. “I teach art at Burgate House. Gave your grandson a lesson today, as a matter of fact. He seems to have a natural talent for sketching.”
T. C.’s smile was bitter tinged. “He has a talent for most things—except staying in school.” He waved a tired hand toward the sofas. “Please sit down … both of you. Would you care for a drink? God knows I would.”
“Perhaps a small pink gin.”
“And you, Greville?”
“Whisky soda.”
“I’ll join you in that.” He shambled across the room to a sideboard and splashed liquor into glasses from crystal decanters. “I knew in my heart he would run away again. Your telephone call came as no surprise.”
