In the Time of Greenbloom (6 page)

Her eyes slipped away from his own.

“Very well then,” she said coldly. “You will stay here until you are prepared to tell me—
all night
—if necessary, with only yourself and your nasty impurity for company. While you are waiting I shall go and telephone Mrs Bellingham and apologise to her for my son's behaviour. I shall explain that I can do nothing with him and that I shall quite understand if he's never invited anywhere again. I shall also write to this girl's mother and make our apologies—mine and Daddy's—to her as soon as I know her name.” She paused. “What was her name?”

“Victoria Blount.”

“And how old was she?”

“Simpson asked me that—and I don't see that it matters.”

“Of course it matters you young fool!” she blazed at him, and he remembered the bonfire. “That's why
Simpson
asked you; it's what they'll all be asking tomorrow.”

“I don't see why,” he muttered, bewildered by the new access of her anger.

“How old was she? Was she older than you or younger?”

“Older—a little; I think she was twelve and a bit.”

“Why did you make her take her clothes off?”

“I
didn't
! I tried to stop her.”

“
What
?”

“I tried to stop her,” he spoke rapidly. “I only took her to see the swans, Mother. I only wanted to be alone with her
and the swans and when we got there she wanted to bathe. She—”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.” It was dreadful to have to talk about her at all; like saying a prayer backwards.

“What did you say her name was?”

“Victoria, Victoria Blount.”

“From Newcastle?”

“I think so.”

“And were her parents there, both of them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she hasn't got two parents. She told me that they were divorced or something.”

“Ah.” Her mouth relaxed. She looked at him again almost kindly for a moment as though he had stopped a pain for her, a headache.

“Of course,” she said. “I remember now,” and she sighed again.

They stood there together. For the first time since they had entered they heard small sounds from the garden outside. His body seemed to be working again; he was aware of his knees his ears the curl of his fingers by his side. In some indefinable way he knew that it was nearly over now, that soon he would be able to go on with things again where he had left them so long ago by the edge of the lake.

Opposite him, against the flaking distemper, she was watching him once more.

“One thing more I want to know,” she said, “to feel
quite
happy about you.”

“Yes Mother.”

“When she was—after she had taken all her clothes off did you do anything to her? Did you touch her in any way?”

“No.”

For one last moment her eyes looked into his again and this time he looked away.

“You're sure?”

“Yes.”

Her face was utterly relaxed for a moment; then when she spoke he saw the first flicker of personal interest she had betrayed that afternoon.

“Did you look at her, John?”

Yes, he thought, I did, I looked at her and I saw her as I see her now, as I'll always be able to see her even without closing my eyes whether I'm asleep or awake. I saw her, all of her that was to be seen, and that no one else will ever be able to see again no matter how long they may look or live.

In this moment there was no one there but himself; they were all gone under the clock and did not matter at all. They were fixed for ever in the dining room in front of their empty cups under their absurd hats and he would tell them nothing.

“
Did
you?”

Her insistence roused him from the secrecy of his thoughts, he recalled the question and considered it afresh:
her
question, what
she
wanted to know.

“Yes,” he said boldly. “Yes I did—in a way.”

She drew breath to reply. He saw her lips dilate to shape words; but before she had time to utter even the first syllable of the expletive which he knew must follow, he spoke again.

“But
that
wasn't wrong, not to
see
. I didn't
look
, I
saw
! If other people want to turn seeing into looking it's they who are wrong not me, isn't it? So we needn't ever tell them, need we?” He felt his hands clasp convulsively together in front of him. “Oh please don't tell them, will you Mother?”

He saw her eyes, pale as ever, falter; and her neck, braceleted with creases flushed with quick pink as she replied:

“No! But—”

She never finished; her voice was far far away; it was more a memory even than the song of the thrush and he smiled to himself as she turned away from him and opened the door that gave on to the garden.

He watched her hurry across the dimming lawn into the dusk, saw her black dress, her eager thrusting little body become one with the darkness under the beech hedge, and turning caught sight of himself in the long cracked summer-house mirror. Tall and thin, pale as Victoria, the shadows clung like fine dark hair to the temples of his forehead.

Do you love me? Yes I love thee
Though I do not know what Love can be
If Love be separate from me
Or you be other than my love
.

She had seemed until this morning far away from him; Victoria had seemed so impossibly far away that from the very beginning of the term, he had refused to allow himself to think of her.

He was good at this ‘not thinking' now; it had taken him a few terms at the Abbey to learn the trick of it; but once mastered it had stood him in good stead, particularly at night time: for with the night, with lights out in the ‘Browns' at nine o'clock, the sharpest and the most lovely of his memories would seek admission (like visitors from home), through the still blue curtain of his cubicle, their aspects profoundly dear yet terribly changed.

The cubicle, with his name and school number printed clearly on the pasteboard slip:

BLAYDON J. 55

was their meeting place, their certain rendezvous, where, assisted by touches from Northumberland: a sprig of bell-heather, a cushion-cover from the old nursery, some letters and a photograph or two, they could be strongest and most importunate.

But this morning, with the arrival of Victoria's letter postmarked Richmond, the swift reply to his own hastily scribbled note of Sunday last, the rule had been waived; he could think of her again freely, for David had kept his promise and had invited her to his wedding.

True, she had to be back at her own school by 5 p.m., but that could easily be managed; John himself could take her back to Richmond on the Underground. They would roar along in one of those fiery red trains eating sweets and talking about the wedding; and perhaps at the end of it all, when the
time came for him to make his own lonely way back to Victoria and to four more confusing weeks at the Abbey, he would be clearer in his mind about Marston and know which of the two he loved the most and why.

Slyly, at his desk in the middle row of the class room, he patted the crinkled envelope of Victoria's letter as it lay in his pocket, and then turned his head slightly so that he could see Marston's fair hair and dusky Madeira-sunned cheek as he leaned down over his desk and gazed intently at his
Chardinal
.

At that moment, Monsieur Camambert, totally forgotten until now, raised his grey head against the blackboard and addressed him.

“Blaydonne, you will now commence by translating from where Fleming 'as left off.”

Remembering by some trick of the attention the last words Fleming had uttered, John found his place with a trembling finger and began to flute out the words. He felt suddenly triumphant, like a tightrope walker who has succeeded in doing a difficult pirouette and then swayed surely back on to his wire. Everything was going right for him today; nothing, he was sure, could go wrong; and, to crown it all, he would give the rest of them a lesson in French.

“
Dans notre jardin
,” he began. “In our garden,
nous avons des fleurs rouges et blancs
, we have flowers both pink and white…”

Monsieur Camambert looked up, and a head or two swivelled.

“
Rouge
?” he demanded.

“Red.”

“Not peenk,
mais
‘red'?”

“
Oui
—I mean, yes, sir.”

Monsieur Camambert frowned; he never smiled; he was either very very depressed or very very irritable, and whichever he was, he was equally dangerous.

“Also,” he went on, “I do not see zer word ‘both' in my Chardinal. Perhaps you 'ave it in yours?”

“No sir.”

If only the old fool would let him get started, he thought; already the others were beginning to take the wrong sort of notice. He had intended to have their admiration this morning, especially Marston's; but if this went on they would soon, from mere force of habit, begin to laugh at him and by so doing would bring out the wasp in Monsieur Camambert.

“Very well, do not translate words satt are not there, Blaydonne. Proceed!”

“We have roses, I mean flowers, red and white,” John said flatly. “
Nous avons aussi, des arbres et des petits oiseaux
, we have also trees and little birds,
qui chantent, tous les soirs
, which sing every evening.”

He paused; did they never have big birds in France? Why were
les oiseaux
always
petits
, and he pictured to himself a swarm of minute birds whistling and creakling every evening in the delicate land of France.

“Well Blaydonne, why 'ave you discontinued? What is the difficulty?”

“No difficulty sir—”

“Proceed.”

“
Et dans l'Ete, nous avons des petits hirondelles
—”

Little what? obviously some sort of a bird. He had looked it up last night with Marston. They had shared sugar-cane from Marston's home in Madeira and he had told him all about his eldest brother's, David's, wedding on Saturday. He hadn't told him about Victoria though; he had wanted to, had longed in fact to tell him all about their bathing incident at the Tennis Tournament, the row with his mother and David's cleverness in smoothing her down by explaining that it was only their innocence which had made it seem so dreadful. But somehow he had been unable to mention Victoria at all last night; she had seemed out of place, ‘a home person' and therefore untouchable and unmentionable. Or at least so he had persuaded himself
then
though underneath he had had a feeling, scarcely acknowledged, that there had been another
reason for his reserve, something very very uncomfortable and wrong if not actually wicked. But perhaps tonight, if Marston gave him the swimming lesson in the indoor bath and then came into his cubicle as he had promised, he would be able to tell him everything.

Under the swiftness of his thoughts, he had still sought the missing word and still automatically measured the pause which his delay had necessitated. “And in the summer,” he repeated, “we have little—little—
spadges
.” The word projected itself into the silence before he even knew that it was there. Desperately he plucked at its tail, trying to crumple it down unnoticed by correcting himself loudly. “I mean sparrows, sir, Monsieur Camambert.”

But already the expectancy, even the titters of the others, were filling the room. On the dais Monsieur Camambert was reaching for his red-ink pen. The fatal word, transmitted down the School year after year, never forgotten, never forgiven, was the centre of a joke almost as stored and yellow as the French master's goatee beard, and for him, still as prickly and as proud; the very last insult which he would receive or which John had intended.

Watching him search the pockets of his grey alpaca jacket for the tissue paper on which he wiped the nibs of his many pens, John saw the wedding and all that it meant receding like the train, the wonderful train to London which whistled and plumed over the marshes he could see from his cubicle window in the ‘Browns'.

His pen poised like a tiny arrow in his left hand, Monsieur Camambert looked up.

“One hour drill,” he whispered.

“But sir—” John's ears were glowing, his eyes floating in the superfluity of unshed tears. If only he could explain; the pen was moving now, delicately and remorselessly over the slip of paper on the desk.

“For impertinence,” said Monsieur Camambert with satisfaction, “it is
always
One Hour Drill.”

“But sir, excuse me sir, couldn't you this once—I mean
tomorrow is my brother's wedding day, and if the Badger—I mean Mr. Bedgebury—”

There was a roar of laughter from the others. Behind him Fleming put on his stage heroine voice.

“Tomorrow ith my wedding day,” he squeaked in an absurd falsetto.

Someone let out a peal of contralto laughter, and at the back Beckett Major, the dullest and most unenterprising of them all, unleashed the only turn in his repertoire: a long low infinitely lewd and mournful passage of wind.

The sound of it, long continued, ending in a semitone that contrived to be at once a commentary and enquiry, so shocked them all that instantly there was silence.

Monsieur Camambert trembled. His usually pale yellow face took on momentarily the glow of health as his anger flushed up from his wing collar.

“
Two
hours drill. And leave the class,” he pronounced in a whisper that sawed through the silence.

John gathered together his books and stumbled out between the hard corners of the desks and past the intimately known faces to the red-tiled passage.

He caught Marston when the class came out at twelve o'clock, managed to edge in behind him and follow him down to the locker-room in the basement where one or two of the others were collecting their swimming kit. Seizing his chance, he stooped down beside him as he kneeled to open his locker.