It was of course proper that Robin Hayes should be early on my term’s list for this occasion. And I had decided that as soon as he was sat down with his tot I would speak to him about my visit to his father. It wasn’t a thing to come to casually or by the bye later on. So this I did.
‘Robin,’ I said, ‘I called the other day on your father.’
I ought to have said ‘I visited your father’. But Hayes appeared unconscious of this slightly awkward slip in idiom.
‘Did he send for you?’ he asked.
‘No. The suggestion came from your mother.’
‘Oh.’ Hayes paused on this. ‘But of course. She would.’ He paused again. ‘What did she have in mind?’
‘Something I remember you mentioning yourself, Robin. She is concerned that your career should not be affected by what has happened, and she was anxious that I should discuss the problem with your father.’
‘No problem. Or not of that kind.’
I found this clipped utterance disconcerting, and I paused in my turn to consider.
‘About your being called to the bar,’ I said.
‘I don’t intend to be called to the bar. I never have intended to be called to the bar. It has been just one of my mother’s things. What did my father think?’
‘He appeared to think that a lot of money would be involved. One has to wait a long time for one’s first briefs, and so on. So he wasn’t enthusiastic.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Not that the money is a real point.’
Hayes was silent after this. He appeared to feel that he had patted the ball back into my court. I felt discouraged. But if the boy was hardening in his contacts with authority in general I couldn’t blame him over much. Nevertheless I became a little clipped myself.
‘Not the point?’ I repeated.
‘I mean I’ve an uncle who will pay up if I ask him. My sister and I call him our wicked uncle. Uncle Jasper. With a name like that, and a reputation to match, you feel he ought to be a baronet.’
‘Robin, please be sensible, and tell me about this uncle without being clever about him. Your father mentioned him. But is he really a factor in your situation?’
‘I think so. Or I think he’d like to feel he is. Uncle Jasper believes he commands the subtle sort of flattery that goes down with a schoolboy.’ Hayes glanced at me swiftly, and must have seen I wasn’t very content with all this. ‘He’s an uncle on my mother’s side,’ he went on. ‘I used to suppose that meant that my mother must have at least a little money of her own. Family money is usually a bit like that, isn’t it? But it isn’t so. Uncle Jasper made his money – which of course is less respectable than just inheriting it. He has bought my mother this or that from time to time, but in a general way he’s pretty close-fisted. My father has had a go at him more than once, but all in vain. What made my father’s applications awkward, I suppose, is that he disapproves of brother-in-law Jasper. On moral grounds.’
Robin was silent again, having achieved what he would no doubt call an irony. I told myself that every clever boy goes through a phase in which he has to talk for effect, and that the circumstances of my Head of House had precipitated him into it now, rather than – as was more usual – during a freshman year at the university.
‘Let me get this clear, Robin,’ I said. ‘You feel that if money is needed to take you to Oxford, and then to launch you on a career in one profession or another, it would be reasonable for you to ask your uncle for it?’
‘Reasonable, yes. But not perhaps very nice.’
I ought to have approved of this judgement, since it suggested a proper diffidence in sponging upon a relative. But there had been something faintly equivocal in Hayes’s tone, and I felt a little at odds with him. I might have told him so had he not again taken charge of our conversation.
‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘Uncle Jasper is Jasper Tandem. The Tandem pop discs and cassettes. It’s not very distinguished. But he got in, first on the one market and then on the other, bang on the ground floor. I don’t think music means much to him. He’s by way of despising what he peddles, and hasn’t a clue that pop has its peaks as well as its swamps. My sister Julia and I believe he boxes clever in other fields as well. Clip-joints of a variously sleazy sort.’ It amused some boys at that time to bespatter me with what they thought of as baffling slang. ‘Well, that’s my uncle, and I’m sorry I haven’t made him sound very attractive, because I’m afraid he’s going to ask to meet you quite soon. He’s coming to Helmingham, he says, to see how I’m shaping up, and he’ll take it for granted that you’re going to be laid on.’ Robin paused for a moment, and suddenly looked troubled. ‘I’m sorry about all this,’ he repeated. ‘It’s not what I should be talking about – or how, either. And I’m not sure I’m coping at all well with the House.’
I wasn’t myself sure about this, and I reflected that a good senior prefect, although invaluable in a way, is prone to regard himself as more of a linchpin than is necessarily the case, and to agonize accordingly. Robin (I was coming to think of him, as well as to address him, by his Christian name) had serious issues confronting him as a consequence of his father’s turpitude, and a right or wrong resolution of them might reverberate through much of his adult life. I had thought of his duties as Head of House as a distraction from the unfortunate state of his home affairs. It hadn’t been at all my idea that such vexatious (and, as the world might judge, absurd) employments as making small boys get under showers and big boys drink only their permitted half-pint of beer in what they were pleased to call their bistro should become a burden to my senior prefect. So now I said something cheerful about House matters, and avoided (as I think I had already decided to do anyway) all reference to the odd business of hydrophobia and swimming lessons. And then I came back to Mr Jasper Tandem.
‘As for your uncle,’ I said, ‘it’s true that I don’t as a rule expect either aunts or uncles to turn up on me. But if Mr Tandem is likely to come forward with practical assistance to you in one form or another’ – I thought this a judicious phrase to use – ‘then it will only be proper that he and I should get to know one another. Just give me reasonable notice, Robin, and I’ll be delighted to meet him.’
‘Thank you very much.’ The boy stood up, and for an instant contrived to look at me still in a troubled fashion but somehow to a faintly amused effect as well. ‘And thank you for the sherry,’ he added correctly. As he turned and left the room, it was with a lightness and a curious economy of movement that might have been called graceful had the word been at all appropriate to a schoolboy. As it was, I reflected that here was a first-rate wing three-quarter likely to be lost to Helmingham.
I don’t think I was much worried by this. My interest in games and in athletic matters generally was no greater than the conventions of my profession required. But I would be disturbed if the behaviour of my Head of House came to be judged by the school at large as eccentric or even ‘soft’. And no sooner had this come into my mind than I caught myself wondering whether there might not be something in such a verdict. I liked Robin. Of that there was no doubt whatever. But it wasn’t quite with the liking I felt from time to time for boys given vigorously to physical accomplishments and little else. I was becoming interested in what went on inside Robin’s head. Yet wasn’t this at least partly because of what had emerged about his family situation – and hadn’t I once or twice speculated curiously on what might be the underlying relationship, and conceivable temperamental affinity, between the boy and his father? Mr Hayes’s criminal behaviour had arisen, one had to suppose, from an inability to face up to his financial difficulties in a forthright fashion. Was it possible that his son owned a streak of the same weakness, and that he had invented the whole business of a fear of water, together with a sudden resolution to conquer it, as an easy means of avoiding the hazards and strains of attempting to become, by way of the rugger field, an idol of the whole school? And didn’t this reading of his conduct cohere with the odd wish he had expressed to
me at the beginning of the term ‘to retire into private life’?
I am aware as I write that this string of questions must appear small-minded and gratuitous. Indeed, it is certainly so. I can only plead that among the vocational risks of schoolmastering is the growth of a habitual suspiciousness in face of the activities of the young. I don’t know how it may be with girls, but boys delight not so much in deceit itself as in the skilful engendering of the imputation of it on grounds presently exposed as ludicrously fallacious.
However this may be, here I was, likening Robin’s retreat upon a swarm of infants receiving swimming lessons to Achilles’ legendary concealment among women. The thought was still in my head when, later that evening and while walking through the east cloister, I ran into Vass. Vass, a retired warrant officer of Marines, was the bath-wallah when teaching the junior boys to survive in water; more augustly, he presided over boxing, fencing, and boats – Helmingham being in a modest way a rowing school. I judged Vass to be well met, and halted before him at once.
‘Good evening, Mr Vass,’ I said (for one should address a warrant officer like that). ‘How are the juniors getting on with their swimming?’ I asked this question in a casual and genial way, and was surprised by the long face with which Vass received it. And he spoke with corresponding gravity.
‘As a matter of fact, sir, I was on my way up to see you. About Mr Hayes, it is.’
‘Hayes?’ I had been startled, but I don’t suppose I showed it. ‘I’ve heard he’s taking lessons with you.’
‘Yes, sir – along with the younger lads.’
‘And he’s getting on all right?’
‘So it seemed, Mr Syson. So it seemed, although at times he was a little absent in his mind. Sitting on the edge of the pool and gazing at the small fry as if he didn’t see them. I pulled him up sharp on it after a time. And he told me a funny thing.’
‘Ah, yes.’ I nodded as if with mild interest. ‘That fear of water, eh?’
‘Just so, sir. I used to hear of such a state often enough in the Service. It can be got over, and I told Mr Hayes he was right to try – but that he ought to have explained himself to me at the start. I was a bit sharp again.’
‘Quite right, Mr Vass.’
‘Well, the strange thing was there had never been a flicker of it, right from the first day of his getting into the pool. Nor after we’d had this word about it. So I was lulled, as you might say.’
‘Something has happened?’ I asked. I was alarmed.
‘Yes—and very bad it might have been. I’d got him off the pole, and when I wasn’t attending to him I let him plouter around with wings. Not that I approve of wings.’
‘I understand they’re no longer regarded as a good idea, Mr Vass.’
‘Well, there was Mr Hayes – out of his depth as he oughtn’t to have been. And suddenly he lost the wings. And panicked. Down he went, you know, and up with a mouthful of water, and flailing round, and down again. The regular thing. And I’d just taken it in when a smart little lad of the name of Barton, who hasn’t all that more to learn, was in the water and after rescuing him. The best of the Under Fifteens, Master Barton is, and had been having lessons from me in emergency drill. He knew what to do and was doing it – prompt and without a mite of fuss. So I held my hand while you could be counting ten. It might do Mr Hayes a bit of good, I reckoned, if he had to be hauled out of his trouble by a youngster like Master Barton.’
‘There may have been something in that,’ I said, not too graciously. Vass’s Mistering and Mastering always annoyed me, although I knew that, oddly enough, it was one of his means of keeping the whole body of the boys in awe. ‘But did you have to intervene?’
‘That I did, sir—and I don’t know when I last moved as quick as I did. For one moment it was all as it should be: Mr Hayes got on his back, and Master Barton beneath him, thumbs behind the ears and fingers to chin. And the next moment it was bloody hell let loose – begging your pardon, sir. Mr Hayes had been got well within his depth by the lad, so that there seemed no danger, nothing but what you might call an improper occasion, when suddenly the panic was on him again, and he was lashing around like a wild Irishman, and then his hands were round the lad’s throat. It’s the recognised risk, as you’ll be aware, sir, in that situation, and I don’t doubt Master Barton knew what to do. But he wouldn’t have quite the right strength for the jab, you see, and in a flash there were the two of them, struggling beneath three feet of water. I had them out before anything you could call real damage was done – only there will be bruises on that game little chap’s neck in the morning.’
‘What about the other boys?’ I asked. ‘Were they frightened or inclined to make a sensation of it?’
‘None of them was as frightened as me, Mr Syson. I doubt if they thought anything had been happening except the kind of skylarking I’m likely to take a gym-shoe to.’
I had never heard of this sanction as commanded by Vass, and it interested me.
‘But you wouldn’t,’ I asked, ‘take a gym-shoe to Hayes or any other senior boy?’
‘Would I not, sir? The Captain of School himself would touch his toes if I told him to, and do his best to batter my nose in the next time we got in a ring together. It’s a tradition, Mr Syson, a tradition of the school. I’m a regular old-style Master at Arms.’
As Vass had come to Helmingham some years after I had, it seemed odd that I could be instructed about a streak of weird behaviour in the place after this fashion. I was perhaps the more struck by it because I had never myself hit a boy in my life. But this was to go off on a side-track, and I returned to the matter in hand.
‘Were you coming across, Mr Vass, to consult me as to whether anything further should be done about it?’
‘Only to report, sir. It’s for you to say. So far as concerns Mr Hayes, that is. But perhaps I might say a word about him?’
‘I’d be grateful if you would, Mr Vass.’ I didn’t say this out of politeness, for I was coming to feel that light on Robin Hayes might be prizeable from any quarter.
‘Well, sir, I’d let be. Mr Hayes has what he must conquer if he’s ever to look himself in the face, as you might say. There’s not a doubt about that. And if you were to tell him he must give over, or even that he must switch to private instruction from me at such odd times as we could both fit in, it might upset him more than we’d care for. I’ve no thought to be curious, Mr Syson, but I gather that these days young Hayes has a good deal on his plate. So softly, softly it had better be.’
I was struck by ‘young Hayes’, which seemed to signal a certain warmth of regard for Robin on Vass’s part. I also took note that Robin’s domestic difficulties had gained some currency among the lower hierarchies of the school.
‘What about the boy Barton?’ I asked. ‘Is he likely to go chattering about this unfortunate affair to his admiring friends?’
‘That he is not. I spoke to him.’
‘Telling him not to?’
‘Nothing of the kind, sir. Telling him he went wrong at an awkward moment, not getting that jab in, and that at life-saving he still has much to learn.’
‘I see.’ I was a good deal impressed by this command of a ruthless guile. ‘And I agree with what you say, Mr Vass. I shan’t discuss the episode with Hayes. He has his difficulties, we know. Of course the less they’re talked about the better.’
I didn’t really feel that the bath-wallah required or deserved a caution. It was simply that by now I was becoming jumpy over the whole Hayes affair.
But continuing my turn round the cloisters which form a prominent and disingenuous advertisement of Helmingham’s antiquity, I realised that Vass’s story had relieved me of an unworthy suspicion. Vass wasn’t a man to be deceived by a boy in a swimming-pool, and it was clear that water held for Robin Hayes precisely that lurking power to terrify which he had confessed to his friend Macleod. His swimming lessons couldn’t be a ruse for dodging the hazards of the rugger field – whether represented by painful
injury or by the schoolboy’s nightmare of playing for the school and dropping an easy pass at a critical moment in the game of the year. As for being unobtrusive and unobserved, it was true that swimming lessons undertaken amid a crowd of unregarded small boys could be conceived as an effective route to it. But not for Robin, since at any time his aquatic disability, if clearly exhibited and bruited abroad, would at least for a day or two have the whole school goggling at him. A head boy funking a dip! It would be quite something, that.
I found myself smiling as I thus reflected on the innocent anxieties of nonage. At the same time I was surprised by the lively character of the relief which the resolving of at least one aspect of the Hayes family imbroglio occasioned in me.
IV
With a single exception, Helmingham’s ten boarding-houses take their name from those of their first housemasters. My own house was Heynoe, and a portrait of Heynoe, a heavily bearded Victorian cleric, holds a place of honour in the boys’ dining-room. Heynoe is the most recently established of the houses, and the school itself is in no sense an ancient foundation. It does not even represent, as do many of England’s most famous public schools, the filching of a long-established school for poor boys and the turning of it into a school for rich ones. It was in fact started on quite a small scale in 1860 by a group of bishops, deans, archdeacons and laymen who were concerned over what they judged to be happening to the moral tone of public schools in general since the untimely decease of Dr Arnold of Rugby in 1842. There had been at that time only one boarding-house, and it was presided over by the Head Master himself. When other houses followed they took name in the manner I have described, the pioneer establishment became known simply as School House. From that time forward, School House boys steadily maintained that theirs was a privileged position in relation to the school as a whole; that they in fact represented a kind of hereditary aristocracy entitled to the deferential regard of everybody else.
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