An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘That scrap of paper the boy had.’ I said. ‘What was it?’

  ‘I think,’ Miss Sparrow said, ‘it was a cheque. And now I must see if poor Robin will let me bandage that hand.’

  And the admiral’s daughter, who was seldom without an immediate duty, herself departed to the boys’ side of the House.

  VI

  These events took place on a Saturday, and I need hardly say that I woke up on the Sunday morning wondering what I ought to do about them. The wise answer seemed to be, ‘Not too much’. If an eighteen-year-old youth feels for one reason or another pretty miserable, and if he goes out to dine with an intemperate older companion and ends up much the worse for drink, it is his own affair and should be so regarded. If at an Oxford or Cambridge college such a young man demonstrates his condition by breaking a few windows he will have to pay for the repair of them; if his behaviour has been yet more objectionable he will have to present himself before some dean or censor, submit to brisk admonishment, and at least suffer a fine to be chalked up against him in the college books. But unless some extreme grossness has been involved, there the matter will endI could see that in a boarding-school, even though the youth be of almost the same age, different conditions must be taken into account. Oxford and Cambridge colleges get along without prefects, so on nobody is imposed the duty of setting an example to anybody else. And there are no younger boys around, to be startled and perhaps frightened by the spectacle of inebriety in one of whom they are expected to be to a certain extent in awe. There was a further trickiness in Robin Hayes’s position in this regard. As Head of House he was accountable to me, and in practice to me alone. But the office made him, ipso facto, a school prefect as well. In other words, the previous night’s occurrence was John Stafford’s problem as much as it was mine.

  That the Head Master (not to speak of Miss Sparrow) had, as it may be expressed, walked in on the act struck me as not altogether unfortunate. I’d have had to tell Stafford about the incident anyway. Now the natural thing would be that he would take the initiative in contacting me with some temperately phrased inquiry as to what I felt about the background of the affair. But what did I feel? Whatever Stafford concluded, it was at least clear to me that I must without loss of time have it out with Robin personally. But I’d give myself – by way of ordering matters in my own head – until after School Prayers that morning.

  Helmingham was from its inception a strongly Anglican school. As in many similar schools, the chapel dominates the scene. It is a huge affair, with a capacity which must have been vastly in excess of its first complement of boys: a formidable expression of the ethos governing nineteenth-century upper middle-class education. A lofty structure in Butterfield’s best Gothic manner, it has niched over its west portal an uncommonly good copy (it might almost be a replica) of Donatello’s St George as carved for Or San Michele. This, a later embellishment, must have been the gift of a wealthy Old Boy of cultivated taste. Martial saints and knights are also prominent in the stained glass. In the great west window is St George again, this time grappling with his dragon – a writhing brute which the school variously allegorised as German Militarism, the Tobacco Industry, the Demon Drink, and Sex Rearing its Ugly Head. In lancets on each side of this, Sir Gareth and Sir Geraint set out on their respective quests – the first without his taunting but irresistible Lynette, and the second with the unfortunate Enid, drooping behind her leash of horses laden with an ironmonger’s stock of armour, well out of the picture.

  In this temple of muscular Christianity Helmingham boys formerly spent a good deal of time through every day of a twelve-week term, but by the period of which I write this regimen had been relaxed, and devotions were compulsory on Sunday mornings alone. It by no means followed that the chapel was unoccupied at other times. Every school has its minority of extremely religious boys, and Helmingham happened to possess in a certain Father Edwards an elderly chaplain who was popular not only with the pious but with the profane as well – this universality of appeal being contributed to by the fact Father Edwards owned a keen interest in theatrical concerns of a non-ecclesiastical sort, and was a moving spirit in the mounting and producing of school plays. But the religious boys kept him very busy in the chapel throughout the week. They insisted on a great deal of auricular confession, experimented with censers and asperges, and organised mini-services designed to convert their contemporaries in the surrounding villages.

  But School Prayers on Sunday – a kind of matins – is the great occasion. On weekdays the boys wear, and have always worn, skimpy black-stuff gowns in class; at School Prayers they appear, as do the masters, in surplices. They like this, since all boys like dressing up, and the spectacle of these virginal rows of healthy youth particularly pleases those parents, of whom there are always a good many, who are week-ending in the neighbourhood for the purpose of entertaining their sons and their sons’ friends. To this soothing institution I betook myself on the morrow of Robin Hayes’s disastrous ill-conduct.

  The boys sit house by house and in more or less prescriptive places: the small fry at the front and on a lower level than their seniors. We prayed and made responses with precision; we sang Bunyan’s hymn; we listened to a short sermon from Father Edwards. Perhaps betrayed by an exceptional mildness in the November air, Father Edwards drifted from rugger to cricket when in search of metaphors, and we heard a good deal about the Great Scorer and what He is best pleased to have notched up at the end of the game. The boys listened to this familiar homily, straight out of the age of Sir Henry Newbolt, not so much with an appearance of polite interest as in a kind of friendly inattentiveness. The Head Master, who sat a little higher than anybody else, showed himself as exempt from listening at all, since he spent every minute of the service in gazing, or seeming to gaze, successively into the heart of each individual among the six hundred boys before him. This systematic exercise must have been alarming to new boys subjected to it. But the school as a whole accepted the scrutiny as part of the show, and there was always a feeling of disappointment when it happened that on one Sunday or another Stafford failed to turn up.

  Towards the end of the sermon I found I was myself doing a certain amount of scrutinising. It chanced that I sat in my stall (a station of some minor dignity) just opposite the boys of School House, and I was trying to decide which of them was that David Daviot for whose sake – I had to face it – Robin Hayes had returned to Helmingham.

  Being at the start of his second year at the school, David was likely to be one of the ten or a dozen boys in the second pew from the front. He was probably – although Iain Macleod hadn’t said so – good-looking. Yet this wasn’t certain, since it might have been the pathos of an ugly duckling that had won Robin’s heart. As he had lately been a captive of the bug, it was possible that David would still be looking a bit under the weather. Were it true that he had indeed been the object of bullying and even of sexual abuse, it was predictable that, if at all a sensitive plant, he would be very woebegone indeed.

  What I saw was a row of perfectly healthy-looking small boys. Deprived of bottoms and equipped with wings, they might have served agreeably as a choir of cherubs in a sentimental late-Murillo type of picture. But to say this is, of course, to exaggerate their juvenility. They were probably without exception in their fifteenth year – but at a public school that counts as being a small boy still. Eighty or a hundred years before, they would all have been enduring rather a tough time, much as a matter of course. According alike to Macleod and to Tim Taplow’s dawning sense of the situation, they were enduring just that now. I couldn’t see that they showed any very obvious sign of this. Perhaps they had rapidly recuperated during their privileged quarantine while under illness or the threat of it. Boys do pick up quickly . . . Suddenly I realised why these quite random thoughts were going through my head. I was dodging the consciousness that this pleasing row of boys, although cropped, tubbed, scrubbed and surpliced alike, were not uniform in every way. They were all, I suppose, rea
sonably personable lads. But one of them was very personable indeed. That he was David Daviot I didn’t for a moment doubt. And my heart sank as I regarded him.

  It would be no good going on to try to describe David – to say that he had blue eyes or golden curly hair (as he certainly had) or this sort of mouth or that sort of nose. I have very little sense of such appearances. I had no notion, for instance, whether this supremely pretty boy was or was not likely to mature into a handsome man. I just saw what had brought Robin Hayes in thrall. And I didn’t like it a bit.

  Tim Taplow was sitting almost opposite to me, looking worried and irritated. I imagine he was one of those conscientious unbelievers who are troubled at putting in even a formal appearance at any sort of religious service, but who hesitate to make what they would regard as self-important nuisances of themselves by consistently staying away. What occurred to me now was that on the previous evening I ought not to have avoided telling him everything I knew about his David Daviot and my Robin Hayes, and I resolved to do so as soon as the service was over. But he slipped off before I could get hold of him, and it was with Father Edwards that I found myself walking away from the chapel. What was running in my head bobbed up, all the same.

  ‘Father,’ I said – for Edwards liked to be addressed in this way – ‘you know every soul in the place. Would the child at the end of the second row of School House go by the name of Daviot?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Robert. David Daviot. Puck.’

  ‘Puck?’ This perplexed me.

  ‘Ah—I forgot you were in foreign parts last term. We did A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the summer play, and I gave Daviot the role of Puck. He had shown himself to be uncommonly precocious in the theatrical way. He got a lot of applause.’ Father Edwards, although an old man encased within a heavy and trailing cassock, was striding vigorously forward. ‘At the moment I’m worried about him, as a matter of fact.’

  So was I. But I reflected that Edwards’s worry was not necessarily the same as mine. Perhaps the boy was in his confirmation class, and – precocious in this field as well – expressing intellectual doubts which would make it difficult conscientiously to present him to the bishop when the appointed day came.

  ‘Is he clever?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘I don’t know that he is. Certainly not very clever. Were he that, a small success wouldn’t have turned his head.’

  ‘I see.’ In fact I judged this to be the generalisation of one disposed to an optimistic view of human nature. ‘Do you mean that his managing an attractive Puck has resulted in his becoming stage-struck?’

  ‘Precisely that – or that and an incident he says took place in the holidays. I hardly know whether or not he be romancing.’

  ‘What was the incident, Father?’

  ‘Well, he says there must have been some sort of talent-scout present at our play. It’s just possible. In fact, I’ve known it to occur. But that was when I happened to have the son of a distinguished actor in my cast. What Daviot says is that this man later approached him in a public park.’

  ‘My dear Father!’

  ‘Well, yes, Robert—yes. But Daviot was helping a younger cousin to sail a toy boat somewhere – perhaps in the Round Pond – when this person approached him and began talking about an audition with the B.B.C. The man said he hadn’t gone to Daviot’s home – which is, of course, in London – because he knew he had a very strict father – no, that’s not right: grandfather – who wouldn’t countenance any such distraction from the boy’s studies. Those weren’t David’s words, but that was the gist of the thing.’

  ‘And did the boy fall for it?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He says that the man was “nosy” – asking him a lot about his particular friends at school, and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Any boy is likely to resent that.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But I gathered young Daviot did chat to the fellow for quite some time, and then – quite why, I didn’t gather – got uneasy at what he’d been induced to talk about, and the way things were going. So he says he said – and it’s quite absurd – that he would have to consult his agent. And then he and his cousin struck sail, you may say, and went home. I suppose he had been frightened – and quite right, too.’

  ‘It’s an odd story, Father.’

  ‘And completely made up? I thought so at the time. But something equally odd has come under my observation since – here at school, and in the second week of term. I had gone down to our far meadow, which hardly anybody goes near, so it’s a capital place for meditation. And there I had a glimpse of David Daviot talking to a strange man. Not, incidentally, a gentleman. I didn’t interfere, but I mentioned the thing to Tim Taplow that evening. Tim didn’t show much interest. I think he put me down as a senile old chap with a dirty mind.’

  ‘In that case, Father, I’ll own to a dirty mind too. The boy strikes me as a perfect garçon fatal – if such a thing may be.’ I almost added, ‘As a matter of fact, one of my senior lads in Heynoe is much taken up with him at this moment.’ But I forbore. Edward was no doubt the man responsible for the spiritual welfare of the whole crowd of us. But he was not the first person to whom I should reveal – or was it betray? – the confidence which Iain Macleod had reposed in me. I hadn’t even managed to speak to Taplow about it. And that, certainly, I ought by now to have done. This thought was becoming insistent with me.

  So I took leave of our chaplain and went back to the House. I had barely got out of my surplice and thought of a drink when the telephone rang. I wasn’t surprised.

  ‘Syson, this is Stafford. Do I disturb you?’

  ‘No, Head Master. You do not.’

  ‘I thought that we ought to have a word – that I ought to seek a word of advice – about that small affair last night. I apologise for gate-crashing it. Was that Hayes? I had only a glimpse, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Robin Hayes. My Head Boy.’

  ‘Have you had a word with him since?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him since. And he wasn’t in chapel.’

  ‘He’ll have to explain that, I suppose?’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘And the general circumstances of the thing as well?’

  ‘Yes. I imagine, Head Master, that Hayes will do that when he comes to me to apologise, as I don’t doubt he will do this afternoon.’

  ‘Good, Syson. That sounds good. Of course there has been all this strain over his father. One sympathises very much. Is it your impression that he just went out on a blind?’

  ‘Definitely not. He was invited out to dinner by an uncle on his mother’s side. A man called Jasper Tandem, who came to call on me beforehand. It was all perfectly regular.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Was it a party for Hayes and some friends?’

  ‘No. It was just the boy himself. His uncle said he wanted to talk family business with him. Something of that kind.’

  ‘Then I’d suppose, Syson, that the fellow ought to have noticed. Don’t you think? I mean that his nephew was drinking far too much. It strikes me as a little odd.’

  ‘It strikes me, Head Master, as very odd indeed.’ I suppose I was becoming annoyed by this thinly veiled interrogation. ‘The thing has the appearance of having been downright malicious. I have formed an unfavourable impression of this Jasper Tandem.’

  ‘That, Syson, of course weighs with me a great deal. Has the family situation resulted in this uncle’s taking over responsibility for the boy in any formal way? Had you had anything of the kind communicated to you by the boy’s mother or by a lawyer?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort.’

  ‘I suppose his returning his nephew to us dead drunk to be sufficient ground for my writing to him asking him not to visit Helmingham again. It’s something I’ve had to do before – and if you advise it I’ll do it in this case.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind, Head Master. Meanwhile, there’s the question of Hayes’s position in the school.’

  ‘We go easy.’ Stafford snapped this out with c
onviction. ‘Demote your Head Boy while his father’s in gaol, and you don’t know where you are. Quite probably in the gutter press. And fortunately his lapse didn’t happen exactly coram publico. That other lad was Macleod, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A reliable boy. I know his people. And, of course, there was your Miss Sparrow, who bundled me out of the door pretty well before I’d taken in the state of play myself. You must find her an invaluable woman, Syson.’ Stafford paused for a moment. ‘Capable of a quick decision when required.’

  Whether I thought I deserved this one, I won’t say. But I left it to Stafford to continue the talk if he found it useful to do so. And of course he did – to make a deft return to amenity.

  ‘But, my dear Syson, it’s entirely for you to decide. If you think the boy should be sent home, home he’ll go.’

  ‘To be sent home’ was our school formula for expulsion. And it had been darkly in my mind that Stafford might have taken it into his head that Robin had better depart. So I was, in fact, relieved.

  ‘I’ll probably tell him,’ I said, ‘that he will be homeward bound if it happens again. That’s only fair to him. But this time we’ll lay all the blame on the bad uncle. Incidentally, I rather think he tipped the boy lavishly.’ I am not sure why I went on to this unnecessary detail, except that Robin’s action with what Miss Sparrow had said was a cheque was somehow coming to occupy a very uncomfortable position in my mind.

  ‘Well, nothing could be more normal and blameless than that,’ Stafford said – evidently slightly surprised. ‘If I’d been visited by an uncle at Marlborough and hadn’t made a quid out of it, I’d have been very aggrieved indeed. As you’d have been at poor old Harrow-on-the-Hill.’

  A facetious remark of this sort was unlike John Stafford, and took me by surprise. I had been wondering whether I had a duty to tell him there and then that, as well as trouble at home, Robin Hayes had trouble of a different order in School House. But this I didn’t now do, and our telephone conversation ended.