A problem that more actively engaged him, when he had time or thought to spare from the strenuous business of being a schoolboy, which meant doing homework, playing games, placating or outwitting masters, and twice a day traversing the ground to and from Wim Beddo’s Select Academy, was concerned with the mysterious behaviour of Harold and Selina, whom, one Sunday afternoon at a time when he was thought to be at Sunday School, he overheard exchanging urgent whispers behind the closed door of the pantry. At first innocently curious, then less innocently so, he listened with held breath. The man’s voice was commanding, cajoling, entreating; the woman’s, fearful, yet with a queer note that half-contradicted the fear. Fantastic conjectures, things without form or face, loomed in Nicky’s excited brain. He felt ashamed of listening, yet could not drag himself away. This hidden thing attracted him, irresistibly, against his will, just as Mountain’s audacious scripture on the lavatory wall had (until he read it) attracted him two years ago. He was alight with elemental curiosity. What was happening behind that closed door? He could not imagine. He was densely ignorant. But instinct whispered that the secret held for him a profound significance. Fancy rioted; he shuddered, feeling unclean; but his hunger and thirst for the forbidden knowledge outlived this moment of shame. What is it, what is it? his mind persisted. It’s something like what that beast Bligh drew … no, it can’t be that. What is it? It’s something awful or Dad woulduv told me when I asked him. What can it be? Can it be that … or that … or … I wonder what it is. Something dirty. … Of that much he felt certain; round that central idea his thoughts fluttered in sick, eager, frustrated curiosity.
They were coming out! The sight of the turning door-handle broke the evil spell. His limbs were unlocked, and he tiptoed stealthily away to think and dream and frighten himself with a variety of pictures that included one of his brother Harold in prison for years and years. Was it something they put you in prison for? It surely was. It was the worst thing that anyone could do, worse than murder, or else Dad would have told him about it when he had asked so urgently. But Dad, instead of telling him, had answered vaguely, hastily, something about when he was older, all in good time. Good time was no time; he wanted to know now.
His need to know, since Harold was involved in this matter, became clamorous, imperative; and at last, in desperation, he asked Selina herself. For Selina was not a lady. She was a commonplace familiar person who had been, and was still, something of a mother to him. In his earlier childhood she had bathed him and put him to bed, and now that he was older she was a most comfortable person to talk to, for when she wasn’t cross she talked with neither ceremony nor authority, as to an equal. And, most important of all, she knew. She could not pretend to ignorance, could not evade his questions; for if necessary he would frighten her into telling him. She was twenty-nine to his fourteen, but he could frighten her this time. In his determination to get at the heart of the mystery he set aside all tender scruples.
‘Sleena, what was it you and Harold were talking about in the pantry last Sunday?’
The change in Selina effected by this simple question was frightening. Taken quite unawares she almost snarled in her terror, with bared teeth and widened eyes.’ Whadja mean, talking about in the pantry! Whadja mean!’
Frightened, trembling, Nicky stuck to his guns. ‘You thought I was at Sunday School, but I wasn’t. I just went for a walk and then came back home to have a read. And I heard you’n Harold—’
‘O Gaw!’ exclaimed Selina. ‘You bin spying on us, ’ave you? Silly young fool ’e was. I told ’im it wasn’t safe.’ Dull-eyed now, she stared at Nicky miserably. ‘Kept your mouf shut, ’ave you? Not bin and told anyone?’
Nicky was offended. ‘What d’you take me for? I’m not a sneak, thank you. Besides, I don’t know anything to tell. I don’t know anything.’ After a pause he repeated: ‘I don’t know anything about … all that. No one’ll tell me. I’m sick of not knowing. I only think things and … dream things.’
Selina looked at the boy with a new bright interest. ‘What things, ducky?’
‘You needn’t call me those baby names any longer. I’m not a beastly baby.’
‘All right, ducky! What things?’ she repeated coaxingly. ‘Come and tell Sleena all about it, there’s a lamb.’
He hesitated. But after all it was only old Sleena; and, whatever had happened in the pantry, she was still the same Sleena, familiar and ordinary and easy to talk to. He decided to bargain with her. ‘If I tell you, will you tell me?’
The compact was made, the confidences exchanged, the dreams told and interpreted. In his eagerness to know, Nicky lost all sense of shyness or shame; in her readiness to tell, Selina quite forgot the polite art of avoiding plain speech. She told him all that he wanted to know, and more than all; and it was clear even to himself that she was tremendously enjoying the wonder and horror, the breathless hot-eyed attention, with which he listened. For perhaps the first time in her life she held the centre of the stage and had a perfectly responsive audience on whose mind she could play whatever wild tune she chose. She was excited, dangerously, with her sense of sudden power. But when she at last approached her personal confession she remembered to demand the usual ritual promise.
‘You’ll never tell? Not anyone!’
‘Course not,’ said Nicky.
‘Say: Cut me froat, wishermer die!’
‘Cut me throat, wishermer die!’ intoned Nicky. ‘But,’ he added, in a voice of utter dejection, ‘you needn’t bother to tell me any more, Sleena. I know everything now.’
‘That you don’t!’ returned Selina. ‘Not by a long way, ducky. Me and Harold—’
‘Oh shut up about it, do!’ Nicky had had an overdose of knowledge. His curiosity was satisfied, and his life, he thought, was spoilt. It was horrible, horrible, this nasty secret thing that was secret from him no longer. Life was horrible, ugly; it didn’t bear thinking about. Men, above all, were beastly; and he himself would soon be a man. It was clear, too clear, that he would soon be a man. He thought suddenly of his parents, and shuddered. Even Dad. … But that thought pulled him up; there was something here that would not square with his raw puritanism. He was learning quickly.
‘Of course,’ said Selina, with an arm round his shoulder, and peering earnestly into his face, ‘he wouldn’t do it to jest anyone, Harold wouldn’t!’ She spoke proudly, the chosen concubine.
Nicky shrugged himself free and stood up. ‘It’s beastly all the same. It’s … wicked.’ He stared with new curiosity at Selina, now suddenly revealed as a wicked woman. She looked much the same as usual: homely, good-natured, a bit common (he thought) but he was used to her and had always more or less liked her. The puzzling thing was that he more or less liked her even now. ‘I’m going down Coppice,’ he said. He must think this thing out alone.
‘He wouldn’t do it to jest anyone,’ reiterated Selina. …
After this conversation Nicky was vaguely wretched for days, and he hated Harold so much that he couldn’t remain in the same room with him. Harold had never occupied an important place in his affections; being ten years older he practised the authority of a father without a father’s gentleness; and certainly Egg, from the first, had been more of a brother to Nicky than ever Harold had been. But now, for a while, Nicky’s indifference gave way to active dislike; the thought of Harold and Selina was poison to him, a poison that permeated all his sexual imaginings. This grotesque thing he had discovered was worse than Mountain’s lavatory humour, worse even than the pictures that that beast Bligh was so fond of drawing and showing round the class, worse than anything. … Yet, as time passed, and the new knowledge gradually lost its newness, a gleam of light visited his sick heart, a heaven-sent suspicion that this truth was not the whole truth, that perhaps something remained untold that would make all the difference between ugliness and beauty. He had read a good deal about love; for lately, quite abandoning Ballantyne and his kind, he had been borrowing books, on his father’s ticket, from the Free
Library: sentimental novels, from which, however, he got almost as much perplexity as entertainment. The fantastic world these novels offered him was a welcome change from African jungles and Canadian snows, and the scene in which Richard Strangeways is released from his betrothal vows by noble Edna Howard moved him profoundly; wrung his heart, brought tears to his eyes, made him wonder how on earth, after that, Richard could go off and say to the beautiful second girl of his choice: ‘Little woman, you have made me the happiest man in the world.’ The story ended happily enough for Richard, the wedding-bells of the last chapter being followed, at a discreet distance, by an epilogue for the accommodation of a little Richard; but it left Nicky grieving, yearning, over sweet sad Edna Howard. He fell pensively in love with Edna Howard; in his mind he lived that scene over and over again, with himself in the place of Richard, but behaving, in the end, not at all as Richard had behaved. He begged Edna’s forgiveness; he whispered (in the solitude and darkness of his bedroom) endearments that, in daylight, he blushed to remember; and she received back her ring and allowed him to hold her in his arms. Yes, he had known romance; he was not quite a stranger to love; the emotion induced in him by that less than nothing, that dream within a dream, was as authentic, in its degree, as Antony’s passion for Cleopatra. Innocent and ardent, it had lived its brief span nourished on nothing more substantial than the memory of a voice heard only in imagination. A voice incomparably sweet and grave and tender, a heart brimmed with charity: that was the sum of Edna Howard. He never quite succeeded in imagining a face for her.
To this fond fancy his mind now returned, in quest of some key that should release him from his present perplexity. The girls he saw in the flesh were nothing; not one of them ever entered the luminous haze of. his reveries, and in the daylight of ordinary active existence he was ready enough to acquiesce in the verdict of his contemporaries, that love—‘love and kissing and all that’—was a softy’s game, unworthy of a fellow’s attention. But even while paying tribute to this conventional belief he half-questioned its sincerity, for everyone in the Sixth knew that Lawson, for one, and Prothero, for another, were in the habit of meeting girls from the High School in Windermere Avenue; and Bateman, boldest of all, made a practice of walking home from the Saturday cricket matches in the company of Hudson’s haughty sister. Nicky couldn’t but admire Bateman, envying him if not his conquest certainly his courage, his audacity, and above all his singular indifference to public opinion. Bateman, however, was sixteen and possessed several sisters of his own: two facts which, taken in conjunction, probably made all the difference, thought Nicky. In Wim Beddo’s Academy the name of Eileen Hudson was a powerful spell: a joke, if you like, but also the symbol of a dawning aspiration. They were all afraid of her except the dashing, well-mannered Bateman; and he, I dare say, was more afraid than any of them. To Nicky, who had chanced to observe the hero slowly taking off his pads in the pavilion and visibly nerving himself for the greater battle that was to come, some hint of this paradox was revealed. It was clearly a tremendous enterprise, this talking to a girl; and the reward must surely be commensurate with the dangers. He sometimes wished that Eileen had possessed a plain sister, less alarmingly neat and clean, less cool and ladylike, for himself—when nobody was looking —to practise on. He wondered if Bateman had ever kissed Eileen. It seemed impossible, and yet. … He did not need telling, by Bateman or anyone else, that to kiss someone, someone quite young who was neither aunt nor cousin, would be the most marvellous, the most revealing thing that could ever happen. The thought was a leaping flame in him.
Ugly things came sometimes to work havoc in his thoughts, and might, with silence aiding, have left an enduring mark upon him had he not chanced at this time to discover poetry, and a poetry that was somehow different from Marmion, which, with the capable assistance of Mr Glove, they had ‘done’ very thoroughly at school. Despite Mr Glove’s endeavours Nicky liked Scott’s verse, finding it ‘not so dry’ as the prose of the Waverley Novels; and he shared with Hart a special affection for The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which, because Mr Glove had never been heard to mention it, they both greatly preferred to Marmion. Rhyme and metre, the more regular the better, he found immensely satisfying and exciting. ‘The way was long, the wind was cold/—this prologue he could recite, in private, from beginning to end, and he always remembered to say ‘His tuneful brethren all were dead,’ in spite of a natural tendency to put the ‘all’ in the wrong place. These memorizing feats were performed night by night in his little box of a bedroom, of which his father, who himself had had to share a bedroom for some forty years, had been so pleased to give him the sole possession. Learning verses while he undressed for bed helped to keep his mind off ugly fancies—derived from the tales of Poe—that had sometimes made going to bed a terror and going to sleep a thing to be fought against. He had good reason, then, for gratitude to Scott; but now he forgot that debt in the contracting of a new one. Sixpence, two weeks’ pocket money, had bought for him, it seemed, the key of paradise itself: a little red-covered volume in Cassell’s National Library containing a selection from Tennyson. The wonder of that revelation! Marvellous that by adding word to word and line to line such music and such colour could be wrought! He was ripe for Tennyson, for Tennyson and no other. That pensive melancholy soothed his adolescent agitations; the smooth and shining verse carried his dreams upon its surface; and the story of King Arthur’s death marched with trumpets in his mind. He suffered and exulted; his eyes shone for Mariana; he was a Lotus Eater, visiting the land ‘in which it seemed always afternoon’; in mournful rapture he waited for Maud in that scent-laden garden that might have been designed for him alone, so exactly did it match his mood. In time the glory of Tennyson waned, being eclipsed by a greater glory, a purer magic, Coleridge. When he came to this:
The moving moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide,
Softly she was going up. …
at the third line he paused and listened, tasting a pure delight; and, like the tragic lovers of Dante’s vision, he read no more that day.
These events, first Tennyson, then the Coleridge of The Ancient Mariner, were among the great events of Nicky’s adolescence. And this profoundly private life did not at all conflict with his life at school. He and his fellows of the Sixth experienced every enthusiasm proper to their age except an enthusiasm for learning. In the wake of tired Mr Stagg they ploughed three times through the sixth book of the Aeneid without ever being allowed to suspect that Virgil was anything more than a school text-book designed to exhibit the perversities of Latin syntax. Wim Beddo’s having a strong commercial bias, Greek was no part of the curriculum; but Mr Beddo himself would engage to spoil Homer for you as effectually as Mr Stagg was spoiling Virgil, were your parents so eccentric as to have you take Greek instead of Shorthand or Book-keeping. But these things, at best, were not matters in which the boys themselves took any official interest. Nicky and his friends had more important things to think about: such things as marbles; bullseye-lanterns; conkers; top-spinning tournaments; keeping white mice, unseen but not imperceptible, in their school-desks; and school-magazines. In winter they derived much spiritual satisfaction from home-made hand-warmers: perforated cigarette-tins filled with glowing touchwood; and at seasons the more imaginative spirits, greatly to the scorn of the Farringay Grammar Sops, went daily to and from school bowling iron hoops which they called among themselves their steeds and discussed with high equestrian enthusiasm, strutting up and down the playground with ‘skimmers’ pendent from lapels or carried as riding-crops. Of all these epidemics, journalism was the most congenial to Nicky. His serial story, Scalpo the Head-hunter, gave great satisfaction, especially to its author, though it did not get further than the third instalment, which ended in this fashion: ‘“Ye feel hungry doubtless,” said Scalpo, “but we have nought to offer ye I fear me, some of ye must come with me to find something.” A loud murmur of approval greeted the Chief’s speech, for he was a man of few words.
’
With all these matters to occupy him, Nicky paid little attention to the daily misery of his father’s married life. He was aware of it rather as a pervading atmosphere than as an active poisoner of happiness. He was sorry for his father, but he had never taken the final step in sympathy of getting imaginatively into his father’s shoes. From this ultimate pain he was protected by Egg himself, who, for his own sake as well as for the boy’s, revealed always his sunniest side to Nicky, being heartily grateful to have someone near him who was not visibly oppressed by the shadow in the house.
4
Nicky paused on the landing to listen to his mother’s voice. He was reluctant to approach her door.
‘Yes, Mother. All right. I’ll tell him.’
He went downstairs and entered the little, permanently crowded parlour. Even when it was empty of people it was crowded. The chairs and tables and vases and lustres and even the great cabbage roses on the wall—these were a sufficient host. Nicky stood undismayed in the midst of this lumber.
‘Mother’s dying again,’ he remarked.
Egg responded with a tut-tutting noise. ‘That’s not the way to speak of y’r mother, my boy! I’m surprised at you. Does she want me?’
‘Yes. Told me to tell you,’ mumbled Nicky, in confusion.
His confusion was occasioned partly by his father’s rebuke, but more by the fact—which he had only just noticed—that the room contained Harold and a stranger. Worse than that, the stranger was a young woman.
Egg said: ‘Come along, my boy. Come and say how d’ye do to Miss Colebrook. She won’t bite you.’
Nicky, covered in blushes, stumbled forward and shook hands with Miss Colebrook, Harold watching the ceremony with an uneasy, half-derisive grin. And Egg, modelling himself for a moment on his brother Algernon, who had a word for every occasion, forced himself to add that Lily was to be one of the family. ‘Sister for you, my boy. … Well, I must go and see what Mother wants.’
The Pandervils Page 26
