An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I had acknowledged that I felt considerable cogency in this view, but had pointed out to my Matron that a thousand pounds in a boy’s pocket can be unsettling – and the more so if the gift of it be accompanied by deftly malicious prompting to adventure on the part of an older man.

  ‘No doubt,’ Miss Sparrow had said. ‘But I still find the present situation unaccountable. I find Robin’s silence unaccountable. I know he left Heynoe after speaking quite outrageously to yourself. But I’d expect him to make somebody – Iain Macleod, perhaps – a sign. I find myself almost afraid of there having been some disaster, even some crime. Robin manages to cash that enormous cheque . . .’

  ‘He’d hardly need to do that if it had become his intention simply to take David home.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Miss Sparrow had been put momentarily at a stand by my comment. ‘But suppose he does. One can feel something vulnerable about it. And particularly if there has been any sort of rendezvous with his father. We don’t know what sort of company Mr Hayes may have got himself into. Much less respectable than the company at Hutton Green, it may be.’

  I had judged this apprehensiveness on the part of the robust Miss Sparrow surprising – even more surprising, somehow, than Owen Marchmont on the theme of mine shafts and silos. Now, as I drove between frosty hedgerows and over patches of snow (for the mild weather had departed and winter was pouncing on us), I found my mind turning to fantasy in a manner fairly to be described as alien to my temperament. I started imagining, quite weirdly, whole snow-fields traversed by wandering footprints, with here and there a dark splodge of blood thrown in. I conjured up police dogs – bloodhounds rather than any more realistic modern species – hunting down horrors not the less intimidating because only vaguely conceived. This curious indiscipline didn’t last very long, but it suggested a nervous condition I didn’t at all care for. It was with considerable relief that I eventually arrived in the suburbs of Uptoncester.

  The small cathedral city, setting for the unspectacular wrongdoing of the elder Hayes, was then, and still is, a very undisturbed sort of place. There had been, indeed, an attempt to pitch a certain amount of light industry on its outskirts. But as this was mainly concerned with the manufacture of television sets and various electrical contraptions of domestic utility more efficiently produced in Italy or even the Far East, no permanent change was effected. The abortive ‘industrial estate’ was an unfrequented wilderness of empty warehouses and crumbling workshops of singularly depressing aspect. The city remained preponderantly a quiet haven of upper middle-class life, populated by the sort of people, it may be said, who send sons to schools like Helmingham. At Uptoncester anyone from Helmingham ought to feel at home.

  On this occasion I felt not so much at home as – it may be said – sedated. The Georgian terraces – although a little post-Georgian and slightly stunted or anaemic as a result – were as suggestive of an ordered if undistinguished society as was the answering near-uniformity of garb among the persons neither hurrying nor loitering before them. Everything requiring paint was properly painted; the trees and shrubs, appropriately disposed, showed in their present bare condition as having been attentively lopped and clipped; a notable proportion of the shops displayed wares of superior quality. It was not an environment in which such peculations as Mr Hayes had achieved could have operated to any injurious extent. I fell into that frame of mind comfortably described as seeing things in their true proportions. Even the behaviour of Robin Hayes, although to be deprecated, came down to his having departed with a friend only a little prematurely in relation to our accustomed half-term dispersion. All this was perhaps of temporary effect, comparable to that produced by a dose of valium. But I was grateful for it as I identified and drew up before my destination.

  My ring was answered by a uniformed housemaid, a circumstance carrying alike a sense of time-lag and the information that the Hayes family disaster had not yet been productive of penury as dire as I had supposed. I was shown into a drawing-room and there left for an appreciable interval to my own resources; this, too, carried an old-world effect; it is what happens regularly in Victorian novels. Then the door was briskly opened. It was a young woman who entered the room.

  ‘Mr Siphon?’

  ‘Syson.’

  ‘Sorry. I know you’re Robin’s housemaster. I’m his sister, Julia. My mother isn’t back yet, which isn’t very polite. She’s changing her book. Do sit down.’

  I remembered that Robin’s sister followed some secretarial occupation in the town. As it was barely eleven o’clock, I conjectured that this must be on a part-time basis. She was a good-looking young woman, and very like her brother. In temperament, I decided at once, she inclined to what I thought of as the ‘hard’ side of Robin’s nature.

  ‘She’s always changing her book,’ Julia said. ‘She’s taken to subscribing for only one at a time. She could have four at the public library for free. But she goes to one of those subscription places that are on their last legs anyway. The one book is simply an excuse for perpetually traipsing around. When she gets to the shop I believe she just grabs something at random. It’s an excuse, as I say. For what Robin calls showing the flag.’

  ‘Yes. He has called it that to me. It seems better than hiding a diminished head in shame: that sort of attitude.’

  ‘There’s a moderation in all things.’

  After this exchange of platitudes, Julia and I looked at one another in silence. I had a feeling that she was trying to decide whether, although a schoolmaster, I was approximately human. Then she spoke again.

  ‘Have you come to say Robin’s back?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Or that they’ve copped dad?’

  ‘Not that either.’

  ‘An open prison is a mouldy idea. Silly old man! I suppose he just couldn’t help it. A prison should be all dungeons and iron bars and massively bolted doors. Then people wouldn’t fret themselves over fatuous plans about how to get out. They’d just resign themselves to going through with it.’

  I found nothing to say to these propositions, so we were silent again. I glanced round the room. It didn’t suggest the exercise of much taste, or even interest. But the furniture included two or three very ‘good’ pieces – the sort of things, I thought, that come down to grandchildren through a younger son or daughter. If on one or the other side of the Hayes family there had been not too long ago persons of rank or consequence their present position would be all the more humiliating. But if this young woman felt like that, she didn’t show it. She probably thought that I hadn’t driven over to Uptoncester to much purpose. On the other hand, there was no suggestion in her manner that it hadn’t been the natural thing to do. Her style of address was certainly a shade bald, but I felt I could get on with her. I didn’t have that sort of confidence about her mother. In fact I hoped that Mrs Hayes would browse a little before grabbing that book.

  ‘Is Robin,’ I asked, ‘by way of writing home regularly?’

  ‘He writes to me. Mostly no more than would go on a postcard. But always in an envelope. Private.’

  ‘There is a relationship of confidence between you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The sharpness with which Julia said this made my question appear cumbersome. ‘That boy, for instance. The whole works.’

  ‘David Daviot?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Yet again we were silent. I remembered how Robin had spoken to me about his sister, almost going out of his way to assert that it was with her mother that Julia was particularly close. But what Julia had just said surely contradicted this. I attempted to probe the discrepancy.

  ‘Your mother isn’t aware how often you hear from Robin?’

  ‘Well, no—or not lately. He writes to me at the office. But of course he does a family letter from time to time. My mother would have been baffled, you see, by anything like this David Daviot thing. Outraged, I suppose, if she really took it in.’

  ‘I see.’ It was difficult to know how
to proceed with this cool young woman. ‘Robin has had to unburden himself, and it has been to you?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying, isn’t it? I didn’t feel it to be something going on wantonly behind my mother’s back. But the generation gap comes in – particularly since our father’s having had to be locked up.’

  ‘I think I can understand that.’ Although I said this, I believe I remained puzzled all the same. It was probably the first time I had heard the expression ‘generation gap’, although professional experience had made me aware of the thing itself. Even viewed from afar, there is often something distinctly rum about family life nowadays. ‘And you haven’t,’ I asked, ‘heard from Robin since this—this escapade began?’

  ‘Not a word. And no family letter, either. We’re both worried – the womenfolk left at home. A classical situation, no doubt.’

  ‘Are you surprised, Miss Hayes, as well as worried?’

  ‘Very. Silence. It’s unlike him. Unaccountable.’

  If these words startled me, it was because they almost echoed those of the last lady with whom I had discussed the vanished boy’s behaviour.

  ‘And money,’ Julia Hayes added prosaically. ‘He can’t have much.’

  ‘Well, no—it isn’t so.’ I hesitated for a moment. ‘Your uncle gave Robin a great deal of money just before the thing happened. Put bluntly, an extravagant and scandalous amount of money. Your brother and his friend could live on it for months.’

  ‘Uncle Jasper can be trusted to make mischief. The man’s a shit.’

  ‘I must admit I don’t greatly care for him myself.’ I tried not to show myself as shocked. Presumably I had never heard that honestly expressive word on a lady’s lips before. In this interview I was learning all the time. ‘But there it is,’ I said. ‘Robin with suddenly a great deal of money in his pocket, and with this David on his hands. What do you think he’d do?’

  ‘Bring him straight here.’

  ‘Really that?’ Unquestionably I was astonished by what I had just heard – perhaps because it was so odd a variant, this time, upon Miss Sparrow’s opinion: the same root idea, so to speak, but a different destination.

  ‘Perhaps not absolutely straight. Robin would think – he’s not incapable of thinking, you know – and then he would start to cool down. He’d bring David home, and then he’d try to open negotiations with that horrible old judge. Make him promise to remove his grandson from what he thinks of as that bestial School House.’

  ‘But surely your mother would be puzzled at the boys’ turning up?’

  ‘She mightn’t have been all that puzzled. There’s that half-term exeat, isn’t there? She might even see it as a kind of vengeful magnanimity – heaping coals of fire on the judge’s head.’

  It was at this moment that Mrs Hayes entered the room. She was as I remembered her: a full-breasted and tightly corseted woman who, although without anything (her hat excepted) old-fashioned about her dress, contrived to suggest something of the decorum of her class in a past age. A concession to the present one was a shopping basket out of which there protruded the corner of what was becoming known as a coffee-table book. I could understand thoughts about a generation gap coming into the head of any youthful person brought into contact with her. She must have cut a commanding figure on that magistrates’ bench. Whether she had sat on it since her husband’s professional lapse I didn’t know. At the moment, if Owen Marchmont was to be believed (as he no doubt was), there were policemen keeping an unobtrusive watch on the lady’s front door and others lurking in the back garden. From where I sat – or now stood upon the entry of my hostess – I could glimpse through the window the slender spire of Uptoncester Cathedral. I remembered Marchmont’s more or less remarking, like Brack in Hedda Gabler, that people don’t do such things – not within respectable ecclesiastical society. I even wondered whether the woman – not to speak of her daughter – was shadowed whenever she left the house, just in case she had contrived to arrange some tryst with her absconded spouse. There was really nothing to be said for Mr Hayes. The man was an unmitigated pest.

  But I thought I was more entitled to this view than Mrs Hayes was. And Mrs Hayes had barely shaken hands with me – a gesture to which she contrived to lend an air of reluctant favour – before she was exuding the conviction that her husband was simply, so to speak, a bad mistake. Whether she thought Robin a bad mistake too didn’t appear, since for the present at least she wasn’t addressing her mind to his predicament.

  ‘Everything has been done for him,’ she said – and I realised that it was only as ‘him’ or ‘he’ that the head of the family would figure in her conversation. ‘I employed my own knowledge of the circuit to retain a thoroughly reliable barrister. Not a Q.C. To have been obliged to have a junior counsel as well would have been injudiciously to inflate the thing, to say nothing of the expense. But a resourceful man. At the end of the affair he conjured up a very passable speech in mitigation out of pretty well nothing at all. And my own connections have been extremely forgiving – compassionate, it may be said. Only the day before his disappearing from Hutton Green, he was visited by my brother, Jasper Tandem. Jasper, living as he does in London, was able to take him down an extremely handsome bunch of grapes from Fortnum and Mason’s. Mr Marchmont told me on the telephone that he hadn’t even touched them. I asked that they should be given to the poor.’

  During this extraordinary speech Julia Hayes had left the room. I thought she had perhaps been obliged to return to her office, but that more probably she found her mother in her present vein a little hard to take. This might well obtain even if between mother and daughter there was something of the close relationship Robin had suggested. After all, the two males of the family had united to create a state of affairs of a stiffly testing character. But meanwhile here I was alone with Mrs Hayes, and I had to find some manner of address to her.

  ‘I am extremely sorry,’ I said, ‘that Mr Hayes’s unconsidered action should give you so much distress. But you will understand that it is Robin who is chiefly in my own mind. I am very anxious that he should come back to Helmingham and settle down at least for the remainder of this term. Then, by the time that he goes up to Oxford, we can be fairly hopeful that the whole thing will have blown over and been forgotten.’

  ‘It was he who insisted on sending Robin to Helmingham.’ Mrs Hayes simply ignored the tenor of what (perhaps with no great conviction) I had said. ‘I myself was strongly in favour of another public school, although at the moment I cannot remember quite which.’ Mrs Hayes paused (and she didn’t often pause) on this rather odd remark. ‘It is clear,’ she resumed, ‘that Helmingham was a mistake. A bad school.’

  I was scarcely able to believe my ears, and supposed the unhappy woman to be so distraught that she could actually forget for the moment to whom she was speaking.

  ‘I deeply regret that you should have arrived at that conclusion,’ I said as impassively as I could. ‘But Mr Hayes entrusted your son to the school, and more particularly to my own care. I must do everything I can to help the boy out of his difficulties.’

  ‘And School House in particular,’ Mrs Hayes said. ‘School House is very bad. And I suppose it is under the Head Master, which makes matters worse.’

  ‘It is not. The housemaster is my colleague Mr Taplow. I am afraid I cannot usefully discuss School House with you, Mrs Hayes.’

  ‘It is in School House that there has been this depraved boy called Daviot, whom my son has so foolishly attempted to—to redeem.’

  ‘I have no evidence that David Daviot is depraved, madam. But, for one reason or another, there is no doubt that he has been unhappy, and that your son – it must be said impulsively and foolishly – has thought to rescue him.’

  I suppose I was becoming more than a shade pompous. That ‘madam’ had been pompous without a doubt. But the woman was thoroughly provoking, and continued to be so.

  ‘And Daviot,’ she said, ‘is a name I do not wish to hear. We know who this bo
y’s grandfather is. And neither in his charge to the jury nor in his delivery of sentence did he mention my name.’

  At this point it would not have been unreasonable in me to believe myself in a madhouse. There was no reason whatever why Mr Justice Daviot should have named Mrs Hayes, and good reason in common humanity for his not having done so. But the woman was actually contriving to feel that she had been slighted! It seemed to me that my visit to her had proved entirely abortive, and that the best that I could do was to take myself rapidly out of Uptoncester. But I recalled Marchmont’s belief that I might pick up at least a little information which might help in tracing the missing solicitor – and I knew that the sooner he was run to earth the less likelihood was there of his further embroiling himself with the law. So I asked his wife a question.

  ‘Have you any idea, Mrs Hayes, where your husband is most likely to be found? There seems no point in his remaining at large simply as a fugitive. It’s not as if he were some spectacular criminal who might get away to Liberia or Brazil. Ten to one, he is probably undergoing a certain amount of useless discomfort at this very moment.’ I designed this as what is called a ‘forthright’ speech, but was none too pleased with myself when I had uttered it. Mrs Hayes herself, however, seemed to judge it entirely in order.

  ‘He is a very dangerous man,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘It has been my experience on the bench that thoroughly weak characters are often that. You wouldn’t yourself, Mr Syson, expect a rather unsuccessful provincial solicitor to be vindictive before anything else. But he is. I have had a great deal to put up with, Mr Syson. A very great deal indeed. There is something quite irrational in it.’

  Before this outburst, and for the moment, I could only be silent. Rather resentfully, I felt that there was indeed an element of the irrational almost everywhere I looked in this affair. But I was obliged to persevere with my inquiry, even if it involved adopting an almost bullying tone.