Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

  “Glasses often get broke.” By the railway embankment he gave Brian three pennies. “Your wages. The publican handed me a tanner for what we’d done.” In the streets of Sodom it was late, most doors closed and few people about, the dandelion-and-burdock lorry gone. Brian wanted to get home quickly. “I’ll see yer tomorrow night,” he said, outside Bert’s front door. “Is the Count o’ Monte Cristo on your wireless?”

  “No, it’s nex’ Tuesday, I think. We’ll listen to it then, because mam likes it as well. Let’s go on t’tips tomorrer, eh?”

  “O.K. So long.”

  “Abyssinia.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Mr. Jones was a gett, a four-eyed twopenn’orth o’ coppers, a sludge-bumping bastard who thumped Brian six times across the shoulder with a hard knotty fist because he didn’t open a book quickly enough. “The Merch-chant of Venn-niss,” he screamed, each syllable a synchronized crash of pain on Brian’s bones. “Got it?” he demanded. “Got it, you oaf? When I order you to open your book, don’t spend five minutes over it.”

  A parting bat on the tab for good measure left him more or less in peace, staring at a coloured picture on which his searching had stopped. A man called Shylock it was, tall and with a beard, a knife in one hand holding them at bay and a pair of taunting scales in the other, grey eyes set hard on a pack of getts like Mr. Jones, the same puffed-up bastards after a poor old man that were after Brian—and all because he wanted some money back he’d lent them. Old Jones was against Shylock—you could tell from the way he read the story—and Shylock was good then because of it, a poor old—Jew was it?—holding the world’s scorn from him, standing there with his knife and scales—as though he’d just stepped out of the Bible like that other bloke going to carve up his son because God told him to—while some posh whore in the court talked about rain and mercy. (Jones liked her; you could tell from the way he read that, too.) Shylock was clever and brave, an old man who in the end lost money, pound of flesh, daughter, while Jones and his side got everything and went on thumping and being sarcastic and batting tabs with nobody to say a word to ’em. Only Shylock had defied these cock-sucking persecutors, these getts and clap-rags. When Jones made them sing hymns about all things being bright and beautiful/I vow to thee my country/green hill far away, Brian and Jim Skelton turned every word to a curse. Brian knew that if he had to choose between Jones and his copper’s narks who had recently sent Bert’s elder brother to approved school after knocking the living daylights out of him so’s he’d tell them where he’d hid the gas-meter money, and poor done-down sods like Shylock, then he knew whose side he was on and who would be on his side if he could suddenly come to life and step out of the printed book before him.

  Mr. Jones was enemy number one, a white-haired tod who stalked the corridors during school hours, peeped his white moustache and purple face over the glass partition that he could reach only by standing on tiptoe. His steel-grey eyes looked in at the class, moving left and right to make sure the teacher had the boys well-controlled. Signs of slack discipline would bring him bursting in, arms flying at unlucky heads as he marched between rows of desks, a navy-blue pinstriped suit sagging as he got thinner and thinner through summer and winter so that soon, everybody hoped, he would kick the bucket in some horrible way. If Brian were lucky enough not to feel the stab of his random fist, he could tell by his jumping nerves when Jones was coming close, and when he had passed, Brian glimpsed his white collar and putty-coloured spats over his shoes: “If I had old Shylock’s knife,” he thought, “I’d bury it in his bony back.” He laughed to himself: “I’d get my pound o’ flesh, half a stone in fact, and no posh whore would stop me.”

  Headmaster Jones was never without a ball of plasticine, an all-year everyday possession rolled between thumb and finger, furiously moving yet keeping shape as he bashed the drum of somebody’s back with his free hand. Once, the plasticine rolled under a desk to unhoped-for liberty, so he stopped hitting the boy and walked up and down to make sure the rest were still “paying attention” to the teacher’s droning lesson but actually fixing his eagle eyes on the floor, hoping to see his precious ball of plasticine, which was, as it turned out, squashed and held under the boot of a raging boy he had recently thumped.

  His tigerish walks were a nerve-wracking gamble for the class. Brian had a game. Listening to the soft padding of his footsteps approaching behind, he said to himself: Will he stop and hit me? I’ll bet he does. I bet a bloody quid he does. There, what did I tell you? The bastard. That’s a quid somebody owes me.

  Even the teachers disliked him, Brian saw, always on the watch for him peering into the room, and when he did come in they immediately relinquished all power over the class and handed it to him—seemingly in the hope that something would go wrong. But nothing ever did that could not be solved by an erratic scattering of fists among the gangways.

  Mr. Jones’s mouth turned down at the edges, and it was agreed in the class that he could not have been a very pretty baby, some sixty-odd years ago. Brian tried to imagine him as a boy even younger than himself so that he could look back on the age and see him more clearly—to fix an image of a youngster in his mind, visualize him walking over a field with hands in pockets, whistling and heaving a stone now and again at birds. Impossible. Even as a boy Brian saw him a blank-faced nonentity, face gradually becoming more shrivelled until a moustache appeared and the mouth below bent at the side, and the short trousers turned into those of a blue pinstriped suit, and the head of fair hair burst through starkly into white, and the meadow across which he had been walking lost its greenness and became the polished wax-smelling floor of a classroom, and then there was the actual awful figure beside you and you knew that whatever Jones had been like as a little boy it didn’t matter a bogger because Jones was what Jones was now and all you had to do was keep your eyes skinned for him and learn to bend your head right forward on feeling the first smack of his folded hand on your backbone.

  Whenever Mr. Jones opened a book, either to ask questions or read a story, it seemed to Brian an unnatural combination. Books and Mr. Jones did not go together. The comfortable rustle of pages and the crack of his stick or fist did not belong in the same room, were disparate qualities that confused and annoyed him, and weren’t calculated to bring out the best side of his uneven intelligence.

  At home there were no books, but he found a store at the Nook, ancient dust-covered Sunday-school prizes with the names of his uncles and aunts inscribed in impeccable writing within the front covers. He took them from the shelf (“Don’t destroy them, Brian, will you?” his grandmother said) and read their titles: John Halifax, Gentleman, The Lamplighter, What Katy Did Next, The Gypsy; opened them and smelt the mustiness from years of damp storage. A book was too strange an object to read, so he built them into a tower, watched it wobble, gave a push if his construction showed no sign of falling. He placed them in two piles, side by side so that they didn’t fall, took one from the top and opened it. “Once upon a time there was a gypsy named Meg Merrilees.… Nowadays the gypsies.…”

  Merton could not read, but liked someone to reel off the front page of the newspaper to him. “Come on then,” he said sharply to Brian, “read me what it says.”

  “I don’t know the first word.”

  “Course yer do,” he said gruffly, thinking him obstinate. “Read the first bit on it.” Brian looked hard: “Art,” he said slowly. Merton waited for him to go on, demanded when he didn’t: “Is that all? Art? That ain’t a word.”

  “No, there’s a lot more yet. It’s a big word I don’t know.”

  “Gerron wi’ it then.”

  “Tek yer sweat, I’m going as quick as I can. I’m building it up: ‘art-ill.’”

  “You’re a bloody slow-coach,” Merton scoffed. “‘Artill!’ I never heard such a word.” He turned to everyone in the room: “What’s ‘artill’? I don’t know. I’m boggered if I do, do any of you lot?”

  “It ain’t finished yet,” Brian protested, l
ifting the paper again.

  “Well, finish it, then, Nimrod. Come on, I want some news. What’s ‘artill’? Is that the beginning o’ t’ word, or all on it?”

  Brian was indignant: “I’ll finish it if yer’ll shurrup an’ let me. ‘Artill-er.’”

  “That ain’t it, either.” Merton prodded him and winked at the others, who looked on. “I thought yer was a better scholar than this,” he said with disappointment. “There must be summat else besides ‘artill-er.’”

  “There is,” Brian retorted, now seeing the joke Merton was having. “On’y a bit, though. Listen. I’ve got all on it now: ‘art-ill-er-y.’” Then slowly: “Artillery, that’s what it is.”

  “It’s as bad as ever,” Merton pronounced, puzzled. He turned to Lydia: “What’s … what was it, Nimrod?”

  “Artillery.”

  “Artillery,” Merton repeated.

  “Nay,” Lydia said, “I don’t know.”

  “It’s guns, ain’t it, George?” Merton asked, half sure of himself.

  “Yes,” he was answered.

  “Go on then, Nimrod.”

  Slowly he read: “Artillery preparations for the bombardment of Madrid.…”

  He’d heard of scholarship papers that you took at eleven, but someone said you had to know Latin to pass. One weekend he sat in the Nook kitchen: “What people speak Latin, gra’ma?”

  “I don’t know, Brian.” So he turned to Merton: “Grandad?”

  “What, Nimrod?”

  “Who speaks Latin?” He was still plagued by the possibility that Merton, being a grandad, must know everything. “Nay,” came the answer, “I’ve no idea.”

  “Do you know, Uncle George?”

  “No, lad.” He went back to his book puzzled. Who spoke Latin? He’d asked Ted Hewton, and Ted Hewton didn’t know. To ask Jones was inviting a crack on the tab for being so stupid as not to know a simple thing like that, even when no one else in the class knew, and it was better to stay ignorant than get a pasting, he felt. It was obvious that Spaniards spoke Spanish, French people French, and Germans German, but who spoke Latin, that puzzling language on the back of pennies? He copied it out: GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP—worse than Abyssinian it seemed. Mr. James told him, a quieter teacher who didn’t hand out pastings when asked questions: “But it’s dead now,” he added. “Nobody speaks it any more.” And that was that, all that fuss for nothing.

  He stopped the playground flight of a paper aeroplane that, it turned out, was made from a French grammar. He unfolded the would-be bomber and tried to read its message: articles and nouns on one side, a picture-map of Paris on the other. He gave a dozen marbles for what was left of the book, then searched out Ted Hewton to show off his bargain.

  Black-haired pallid Ted already knew how to count in French. “Our kid on the dole gets books from the library, and learns French because ’e ain’t got nowt to do. So ’e learnt me to say some.” They sat in a corner reciting: OON DER TWAR KAT SANK SEECE SET WEET NERF DEECE.

  “What’s eleven?” Brian asked.

  “I forgot,” Ted said. “I’ll ask our kid and tell yer tomorrer.” The first ten were memorized in a few minutes, would stay in a pocket of the brain all his life, but eleven and up was another thing, like a row of strong bolts opening on to the unknown.

  He turned the page of his grammar. “What’s an article?”

  “A thing,” Ted explained, “anybody knows that.”

  “I know they do, but this article ain’t a thing, it’s a word, like ‘the,’ for instance.”

  “Don’t be daft,” Ted scoffed. “How can ‘the’ be an article? An article’s a thing, I’m tellin’ yer.” Brian pushed the book under his nose: “Look. Le is an article, it says, and it means ‘the.’ So how can it be a bleddy thing?”

  “It don’t mek sense,” Ted remarked. “Maybe the book’s out o’ date.”

  “It’d better not be,” Brian said savagely, “or I’ll get my marbles back.” He flipped over more pages. “It’s still a good book, because it’s got lots o’ words in it. Maison, chemin, chapeau, main, doigt,” he said slowly, following the mock-pronunciation beneath each. Ted grabbed the book for a second look, as if he did not believe all those words were in it. “Ay,” he said approvingly, “it’s not a bad book at that.” He flipped through its wad of leaves to the back cover: “’Undred an’ ninety it goes up to. It’s long.”

  “I gen twelve marbles for it,” Brian reminded him, snatching it back as the whistle blew for end-of-playtime.

  Geography, history, and English: in each there was a possibility of learning about other countries and people. In Lands and Life were coloured pictures of camels by big ships on the Suez Canal, and snow-covered mountain tops on the Equator; and in Foundations of History he read how Greeks captured Troy by hiding in the belly of a wooden horse and being dragged inside by Trojans who thought the gods had sent it from heaven as a present (daft people who didn’t know any better); and often for English Mr. James read Coral Island or Ungava. But geography won, meant notebooks with blank pages on which the teacher pressed a roller that left an outline map when he lifted it off, and set strange names on the blackboard that you copied against the map. Brian scoured the food cupboard for labels from foreign places, found pictures of other continents in magazines to stick on the blank pages in his geography notebook until it grew fat with insertions and notes.

  Six columns formed up to be marched in by the prefects. The asphalt yard sloped down to lavatories, and along the wall of the infants’ and junior girls’ departments was written in large white letters: CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS—by order of Mr. Jones, who called in a man to repaint the letters so that on the first few days of each term they shone and glittered with reproach at the yardful of ragged-arsed, down-at-heel, and often unwashed kids.

  Black clouds gathered across shining roof slates, and cold rain blew as they marched inside. Any inside was good in weather like this, and Brian felt happy that an English lesson was on the timetable. His belly was full from a meal at the dinner-centre, and he anticipated a ha’penny from his father when he got home, it being Thursday, dole-day.

  Mixed telegraph messages of clacking desk-lids and stamping feet filled the teacherless room. Rain streamed down the window-panes and, as no one had been told to switch on the lights, the gloom that lay about needed much noise to dispel it. Brian made for the steampipes with Ted and Jim Skelton, and they watched two bodies rolling and pitching in a gangway fight. A smell of damp coats and trousers mingled with breath and polish smells, and a further violent surcharge of rain against the outside glass increased the recklessness within.

  A sly face rose slowly above the door panel, stayed still for a few moments. “Get back to your desks,” Brian hissed. A phenomenon detached from the turmoil, the livid vivid face of Mr. Jones turned this way and that to take in everything before entering the room. Seconds went by like minutes, and Brian looked away from the face at the window to meet the equally distrusted visage of the Laughing Cavalier on the opposite wall, then turned with a half laugh to the front and stared at nothing.

  After the crash of the door and the sight of eyes hollow with rage, the only sound left came from tangible rain outside. Mr. Jones grabbed four boys who had been fighting and hauled them one by one to the front, a few well-placed punches getting them into line.

  “What were you fighting about?” he roared, shaking the nearest boy. The noise of rain flowered like a burst dam, for everyone in the room except the frantic expostulating Jones seemed to have stopped breathing. The life had gone out of them, but for hatred and fear. The boy could not answer, and the sound of flesh meeting flesh at great speed jerked silence out of the room. “What were you fighting for, you lout?” Mr. Jones shouted again, into the ear he had just hit.

  “Nothing,” the boy blubbered.

  “Nothing?” he bawled. “Nothing what, you jackanapes?”

  “Nothing, sir,” came between the sobs. With a faintly
sarcastic smile he lifted the desk-lid and took out a stick. His body doubled with spite as he leapt at the culprits: “You don’t fight for nothing, you idiot,” he yelled, hitting the nearest boy furiously across the back and shoulders. “You don’t fight for nothing, do you? Do you? Eh? If you want to fight,” whack, whack, whack, “then fight me. Come on, fight me,” whack, whack, “fight me, you nincompoop.”

  He’s barmy, Brian thought. He’ll go into a fit one of these days and wain’t be able to come out of it. I’m sure he will, as sure as I sit here. Either that, or somebody’s dad’ll come up and knock him for six.

  “Get back to your seats,” he gasped, straightening his royal-blue tie. “And come out the monitors.” Four boys, a piece of yellow ribbon pinned to each lapel, walked to the front. “In that cupboard you’ll find two stacks of books called Treasure Island. Give one to each boy.”

  They went to their tasks with avidity. “I’m taking you for English literature during the next few weeks,” Jones went on, “and I’m going to start reading Treasure Island to you, by Robert Louis Stevenson.” A hum of excitement was permitted. Treasure Island. Brian had heard of it: pirates and ships and other-world adventure, a cinematic hit-and-run battle among blue waves and palm-trees taking place a million miles away yet just above his head, as if he could reach up and touch cutlass and cannon and tree branch to heave himself into hiding.

  “And”—the plangent voice of Mr. Jones made an unwelcome return—“every other Thursday I’m going to ask you questions on what I’ve been reading”—his grey eyes glared, eyes empty if you dared but look at them, which wasn’t so dangerous as it seemed because they stared back at nothing when he wasn’t inclined to bully—“and woe betide anyone who hasn’t been paying attention,” he concluded ominously, opening the teacher’s clean copy the monitor laid before him.

  He had a good voice for reading, rolled off the first paragraph in a booming tone that lit each boy’s imagination like a powder trail. They saw the captain as Jim Hawkins first saw him: a proud suspicious renegade stomping along the clifftop followed by a wheelbarrow bearing his far-travelled sea-chest, heard him demand a noggin o’ rum, and tell Jim to keep a sharp weather-eye out for a one-legged villain called Pew. He ran fluently on through several chapters, before the class was sent flying home through a real world in which the rain had stopped and a mellow sun shone on rainbows of petrol and water in the middle of clean streets. Brian was glad to be free, and could not think of the good story he had heard without imagining a wholesale tab-batting when Mr. Jones questioned them on what he had so far read.