The evening came to an end. Cars were started in the yard of the hotel; there were warnings of ice on the roads. ‘Good-night, Grania,’ the man who’d come for the funeral said. She buckled herself into her seat-belt. Desmond backed and then crawled forward into West Main Street. ‘You’re quiet,’ he said, and immediately she began to talk about the possibility of Una Carty-Carroll being proposed to in case he connected her silence with the presence of the stranger. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said when that subject was exhausted, ‘I met that fellow of Aisling’s once. He’s only thirty-five.’ She opened the garage door and he drove the car in. The air was refreshingly cold, sharper than it had been in the yard of the hotel.
They locked their house. Grania put things ready for the morning. It was a relief that a babysitter was no longer necessary, that she didn’t have to wait with just a trace of anxiety while Desmond drove someone home. He’d gone upstairs and she knew that he’d done so in order to press open Judith’s door and glance in at her while she slept. Whenever they came in at night he did that.
At the sink Grania poured glasses of water for him and for herself, and carried them upstairs. When she had placed them on either side of their bed she, too, went to look in at her daughter – a mass of brown hair untidy on the pillow, eyes lightly closed. ‘I might play golf tomorrow,’ Desmond said, settling his trousers into his electric press. Almost as soon as he’d clambered into bed he fell asleep. She switched out his bedside light and went downstairs.
Alone in the kitchen, sitting over a cup of tea, she returned again to the August Saturday. Two of Trish’s children had already been born then, and two of Mavis’s, and Helen’s first. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Billy MacGuinness had said, ‘if Angela doesn’t drop this one in a deck-chair.’ Mary Ann Haddon had just started her second. Older children were sitting on the clubhouse steps.
Grania forced her thoughts through all the rest of it, through the party that had happened by chance, the headlights picking out the rose-bed. She savoured easily the solitude she had disguised during the years that had passed since then, the secret that had seemed so safe. In the quiet kitchen, when she had been over this familiar ground, she felt herself again possessed by the confusion that had come like a fog when she’d seen tonight the father of her child. Then slowly it lifted: she was incapable of regret.
Children of the Headmaster
The greater part of the house was shabby from use. The white paintwork of the corridors and the rooms had been chipped and soiled. Generations of feet had clattered against skirting-boards; fingers had darkened an area around door-handles; shoulders had worn patches on walls. The part of the house known as ‘Private Side’ was in better decorative repair, this being the wing occupied by the Headmaster’s family – six people in contrast to the hundred and twenty-odd boys who comprised the boarding-school. In the holidays the house regained its unity, and the Headmaster’s children were together again. Jonathan returned to his own room from whichever dormitory he had occupied during the term, and was glad to do so. Margery, Georgina and Harriet explored the forbidden territory of the last few months.
Mr Arbuary, the children’s father, had bought the house with money left to his wife in a will. On learning about the legacy, the Arbuarys returned to England from Hong Kong, where Mr Arbuary had been a police officer. The legacy allowed them the first chance in their married life to ‘do something’, as they put it privately to one another. In those days Mrs Arbuary was on for anything, but had since developed a nervous condition that drained her energy. Only the two older children were born before the family’s return to England, Jonathan and Margery.
Mr Arbuary was a tall, bespectacled man with a sandy moustache, increasing in stoutness as the years advanced, and balding at about the same rate. His wife, once stout herself, was skin and bone due to her nervous complaint, with lank fair hair and eyes as darting as a rabbit’s. Their combination had produced children who were physically like neither of them except that they were blue-eyed and were not sallow-skinned or black-haired. Yet among the children there was a distinct family resemblance: a longish face in which the features were cut with a precision that lent them an aristocratic air, a tendency to stare. Margery and Georgina, when they were ten and nine respectively, were pretty. Harriet, at eight, gave little indication of how she would be in the future. Jonathan, the oldest, had already been told by the Classics master, Old Mudger, that he was not without good looks.
The house that was both school and home was on the outskirts of a seaside town, at the end of a brief, hydrangea-laden drive. In purchasing it and deciding to start a boarding-school, Mr Arbuary did his homework carefully. He recalled his own schooldays and all that had gone with them in the name of education and ‘Older values’. He believed in older values. At a time when the country he returned to appeared to be in the hands of football hooligans and trade unionists such values surely needed to be reestablished, and when he thought about them Mr Arbuary was glad he had decided to invest his wife’s legacy in a preparatory school rather than an hotel, which had been an alternative. He sought the assistance of an old schoolfellow who had spent the intervening years in the preparatory-school world and was familiar with the ropes. This was the Classics master whom generations of boys came to know as Old Mudger when Mr Arbuary had enticed him to the new establishment. Mrs Arbuary – presenting in those days a motherly front – took on the responsibility of catering and care of the boys’ health. The boarding-school began with three pupils, increasing its intake slowly at first, later accelerating.
‘Now,’ Georgina prompted on the first afternoon of the Easter holidays in 1988. ‘Anything good?’
The furniture-room, in the attics above the private part of the house, was the children’s secret place. They crouched among the stored furniture that, ten years ago, their mother had inherited with the legacy. That morning the boys had gone, by car mostly, a few by train. In contrast to the bustle and the rush there’d been, the house was as silent as a tomb.
‘Nothing much,’ Jonathan said. ‘Really.’
‘Must have been something,’ Harriet insisted.
Jonathan said that the winter term in the other side of the house had been bitterly cold. Everyone had chilblains. He recounted the itching of his own, and the huddling around the day-room fire, and his poor showing at algebra, geometry and Latin. His sisters were not much impressed. He said:
‘Half Starving got hauled up. He nearly got the sack.’
Three times a year Jonathan brought to his sisters the excitement of the world they were protected from, for it was one of the Headmaster’s rules that family life and school life should in no way impinge upon one another. The girls heard the great waves of noise and silence that came whenever the whole school congregated, a burst of general laughter sometimes, a masters voice raised to address the ranks of boys at hand-inspection times in the hall, the chatter of milk-and-biscuits time. They saw, from the high windows of the house, the boys in their games clothes setting off for the playing-fields. Sometimes, when an emergency arose, a senior boy would cross to Private Side to summon their father. He would glance at the three girls with curiosity, and they at him. On Sundays the girls came closer to the school, walking to church with their mother and the undermatron, Miss Mainwaring, behind the long crocodile of boys, and sitting five pews behind them.
‘Why did Half Starving get hauled up?’ Georgina asked.
The junior master was called Half Starving because of his unhealthily pallid appearance. As such, he had been known to the girls ever since their brother had passed the nickname on. By now they’d forgotten his real name.
‘Because of something he said to Haxby,’ Jonathan said. At lunch one day Half Starving had asked Haxby what the joke was, since the whole table had begun to snigger. ‘No joke, sir,’ Haxby replied, and Half Starving said: ‘What age are you, Haxby?’ When Haxby said nine, Half Starving said he’d never seen a boy of nine with grey hair before.
Georgina gi
ggled, and so did Harriet. Margery said: ‘What happened then?’
‘Another boy said that wasn’t a very nice thing to say because Haxby couldn’t help his hair. The boy – Temple, I think it was – said it was a personal remark, and Half Starving Said he hadn’t meant to make a personal remark. Then he asked Haxby if he’d ever heard of the Elephant Man.’
‘The what?’ Harriet stared at Jonathan with her mouth open, the way her father said she never in any circumstances whatsoever should.
‘A man in a peepshow who looked like an elephant. Someone asked Half Starving if Haxby reminded him of this elephant person and Half Starving said the elephant person had had grey hair when he was a boy also. Then someone said Haxby might be good in a peepshow and Half Starving asked Haxby if travelling about sounded like a life he’d enjoy. Everyone laughed and afterwards Cuthbert hauled Half Starving up because of the noise.’
Cuthbert was the school’s nickname for the children’s father. Jonathan had felt embarrassed about using it to his sisters at first, but he’d got over that years ago. For his own part, Mr Arbuary liked simply to be known as ‘the Headmaster’.
‘I think I know which Haxby is,’ Margery said. ‘Fupny-looking fish. All the same, I doubt anyone would pay to see him in a peepshow. Anything else?’
‘Spencer II puked in the dorm, first night of term. All the mint chocs he brought back and something that looked like turnips. Mange-coloured.’
‘Ugh!’ Harriet said.
Baddle, Thompson-Wright and Wardle had beep caned for giving cheek. Thompson-Wright had blubbed, the others hadn’t. The piano master had been seen on the promenade with one of the maids, Reene.
Jonathan’s sisters were interested in that. The piano master’s head sloped at an angle from his shoulders. He dressed like an undertaker and did not strike the girls as the kind to take women on to the promenade.
‘Who saw them?’ Georgina asked.
‘Pomeroy when he was going for Old Mudger’s tobacco.’
‘I don’t like to think of it,’ Margery said. ‘Isn’t the piano master meant to smell?’
Jonathan said the piano master himself didn’t smell: more likely it was his clothes. ‘Something gets singed when it’s ironed.’
‘A vest,’ Harriet suggested.
‘I don’t know what it is.’
‘I think a vest probably.’
Soon after that the children left the furniture-room. There was tea in the dining-room then, a daily ritual in the holidays, the long mahogany table with curved ends lard for six. The Headmaster liked it to be so. He liked Mrs Arbuary to make sandwiches: sardine and egg in winter, in summer cucumber and tomato. The Headmaster’s favourite cake was fruit-cake, so there was fruitcake as well.
The dining-room was a darkish room, wallpaper in crimson-and-black stripes combining with two pairs of curtains – velvet, in crimson also, and net – to set this sombre tone. The grained paintwork was the same deep brown as the curlicued sideboard, on which were arrayed the silver teapots and water-jugs, the gravy boats and loving cups, that Mrs Arbuary had inherited at the same time as the furniture and her legacy. It was an aunt who had died.
The children took their places at the table. Mrs Arbuary poured tea. The maid who had been observed in the piano master’s company brought in a plate of buttered toast. She and the other domestic staff – Monica and Mrs Hodge and Mrs Hodge’s husband, who was the general handyman –continued to come daily to the school during the holidays, but for much shorter hours. That was the only way the Arbuarys could keep them.
‘Thank you, Reene,’ the Headmaster said, and the girls began to giggle, thinking about the piano master. He was a man who had never earned a nickname, and it was a tradition at the school not ever to employ his surname. Since Jonathan had passed that fact on to his sisters they had not, even in their thoughts, done so either.
‘Well,’ the Headmaster said next. ‘We are en famille.’
Mrs Arbuary, who rarely instigated conversations and only occasionally contributed to them, did not do so now. She smeared raspberry jam on a finger of toast and raised it to her lips. The school was a triumph for her husband after a lustreless career in Hong Kong, but it had brought her low. Being answerable to often grumpy parents, organizing a kitchen and taking responsibility during epidemics did not suit her nature. She had been happier before.
‘A good term,’ the Headmaster said. ‘I think we might compliment ourselves on a successful term. Eh, Jonathan?’
‘I suppose so.’ The tone was less ungracious than the sentiment. Jonathan drummed as much cheeriness into it as he could muster, yet felt the opinion must be expressed honestly in those words. He had no idea if the term had been successful or not; he supposed so if his father claimed so.
‘A single defeat on the hockey field,’ the Headmaster reminded him. ‘And your own report’s not half bad, old chap.’
‘Georgina got a frightful one,’ Harriet said.
The girls attended a day school in the town, St Beatrice’s. When the time came they would be sent away to boarding-school, but at the preparatory stage funds could not be stretched. Once, years ago, Mrs Arbuary had suggested that the girls might receive their preparatory education at her husband’s school, but this was before she appreciated that the older values did not permit this.
‘Georgina,’ Mr Arbuary said, in his Headmaster’s rather than his father’s voice, ‘has much to mend this holidays. So, too, has Harriet.’
‘My report wasn’t too awful,’ Harriet insisted in an unconvincing mutter meant mainly for herself.
‘Speak clearly if you wish to be heard, Harriet. Reports are written to be assessed by parents. I would remind you of that.’
‘I only meant –’
‘You are a chatterbox, Harriet. What should be placed on chatterboxes?’
‘Lids.’
‘Precisely so.’
A silence fell around the table. Mrs Arbuary cut the fruitcake. The Headmaster passed his cup for more tea. Eventually he said:
‘It is always a pity, I think, when Easter is as early as it is this year.’
He gave no reason for this view, but elicited none the less a general response – murmurs of agreement, nods. Neither Mrs Arbuary nor the children minded when Easter fell, but in the dining-room responses were required.
Increasingly, there was much that Jonathan did not pass, on to his sisters. Mrs Arbuary’s nickname, for instance, was the Hen because a boy called McAtters had said she was like a hen whose feathers had been drenched in a shower of rain – a reference to what McAtters, and others, considered to be a feeble manner. It had been noticed that Mrs Arbuary feared not just her husband, but Miss Mainwaring the undermatron and most of the assistant masters. It had been noticed that she played obsessively with one of heir forefingers whenever parents engaged her in conversation. A boy called Windercrank said that once when she looked up from a flowerbed she was weeding there were soil-stained tears on her cheeks.
Jonathan had not passed on to his sisters the news that their father was generally despised. It had been easier to tell them about Old Mudger, how he sometimes came into the dorm if a boy had been sent to bed before prep because Miss Mainwaring thought he was looking peaky. ‘Well, friendly, I Suppose,’ Jonathan had explained to Georgina and Harriet. ‘Anyway, that’s what we call it. Friendly.’ Margery had an inkling: he’d seen it in her eyes. All three of them had laughed over the Mudger being friendly, Georgina and Harriet knowing it was funny because no one would particularly want to be friendly with their father’s old schoolfellow. But they wouldn’t laugh – nor would he – if he told them their mother was called the Hen. They wouldn’t laugh if he told them their father was scorned for his pomposity, and mocked behind his back as a fearsome figure of fun.
And now – these Easter holidays – there was something else. A boy Jonathan did not like, who was a year older than he was, called Tottle, had sent a message to Margery. All term he had been bothering Jonathan with his mess
ages, and Jonathan had explained that because of the Headmaster’s rules he would have no opportunity to deliver one until the holidays. Tottle had doubted his trustworthiness in the matter, and two days before the term ended he pushed him into a corner in the lavatories and rammed his fist into Jonathan’s stomach. He kept it there, pressing very hard, until Jonathan promised that he would deliver the message to Margery as soon as possible in the holidays. When Jonathan had first been a pupil in his father’s school, when he was seven, no one had even seemed to notice his sisters, but during the last year or so – because they were older, he supposed – all that had changed. Boys he wasn’t friends with asked questions about them, boys who’d never spoken to him before. Once, at lunch, Half Starving had warned a boy not to speak like that about the Headmaster’s daughters. ‘Fancy them yourself, sir?’ someone else shouted down the table, and Half Starving went red, the way he always did when matters got out of hand.
‘Tell her to meet me, first night of term,’ Tottle’s message was. ‘Round by the carpentry hut. Seven.’
Tottle claimed that he had looked round and smiled at Margery in church. The third Sunday he’d done it she’d smiled back. Without any evidence to the contrary, Jonathan had denied that. ‘You bloody little tit,’ Tottle snapped, driving his fist further into Jonathan’s stomach, hurting him considerably.
Tottle was due to leave at the end of next term, but Jonathan guessed that after Tottle there would be someone else, and that soon there would be messages for Georgina as well as Margery, and later for Harriet. He wouldn’t have to be involved in that because he’d have left himself by then, but some other means of communication would be found, through Reene or Mrs Hodge or Hodge. Jonathan hated the thought of that; he hated his sisters being at the receiving end of dormitory coarseness. In the darkness there’d been guffaws when the unclothing of Reene by the piano master had been mooted – and sly tittering which he’d easily joined in himself. Not that he’d even believed Pomeroy when he said he’d seen them on the promenade. Pomeroy didn’t often tell the truth.