The Stranger's Child Part 20

Jenny made a moue and raised her eyebrows as if to say she could reach her own negative judgements. 'No, I like Grandpa's things. I find them rather piquant, actually. Particularly the late ones.' Again Paul was amused and impressed by the confidence of her views. She spoke with a small frown as if she was at Oxford already. He said, 'Is he . . . not still alive?'

'He was killed in the War,' said Mrs Keeping, with a quick shake of the head, stubbing out her cigarette.

'Well, he was extraordinarily brave,' said Mrs Jacobs. 'He had two tanks blown up under him, and he was running to reach a third one when a sh.e.l.l got him.' Her cigarette was in one hand, her lighter in the other, but she went on, before anyone else could, 'He was a hero, actually. He got a posthumous gong, you know . . .'

'What became of that, Granny?' said Jenny in a more docile tone.

'Oh, I have it,' said Mrs Jacobs, quickly puffing, 'of course I have it.' Paul wasn't clear whom her indignation was aimed at. She gave him a look as if they were united against the others. 'You know, people think he was flighty and gay and what-have-you, but in fact he could be quite fearless.'

'Yes,' said Paul, 'I'm sure . . .' slightly mesmerized by her and already an admirer of this man he had never heard of a minute ago.

At the gate Paul turned and waved his bandaged hand but Jenny, who'd been told to see him out, had already vanished from the front step. Still, the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face as he swung and scuffed along the lane. He smiled at the view over the hedge, at the other front gardens, at the approaching Rover and then its driver, squinting in a rictus of his own against the evening sun, and making Paul feel again like an intruder, or now perhaps an absconder. The sun was still hot on his back. Among the trees the church clock chimed the quarter-hour once more he checked his watch: 7.15 of course; the hour just gone had taken about twenty minutes, and some compensating sense made him wonder if it shouldn't in fact be 8.15. Here he was in Church Walk. Here was the marketplace. He had never really touched spirits before, and the second gin-and-tonic, as wildly drinkable as the first, had brought him to a state of grinning elation just touched by notes of worry and confusion. He'd been talking and telling himself not to talk, things he normally avoided saying, about his father's plane being shot down, and his mother's illness, and even his exploits at school, things that must have made him sound childish and simple. But no one had seemed to mind. Now he wondered if Mr Keeping, who said very little, hadn't thought him a fool it was actually rather creepy of him to get Paul drunk and just sit there watching, with his unnerving smile. He imagined some sarcasm about it, in the office tomorrow. On the other hand, he felt he'd been quite a success with old Daphne Jacobs, who seemed grateful for a new listener, and he'd laughed and winced sympathetically at her stories without necessarily following them. He often found, when he concentrated really hard on what someone was saying, that nothing much went in. The intoxication was partly that of being in the home of people who knew writers, in this case quite famous ones. He was barely aware of Dudley Valance, but he quoted whole verses of Cecil Valance's to the old lady, who smiled indulgently and then began to look slightly impatient. She had a soft uncanny light about her, somehow, from having been his lover it turned out 'Two Acres' had been written specifically for her. She told Paul about it quite frankly, over the second Gin and It (whatever It was), and Jenny had said, 'I think Uncle Cecil's poems are awfully imperialist, Granny,' which she pretended not to hear. In Vale Street he looked through the windows of the International Stores, closed and shadowy. Something shockingly sad caught at him he was free, buoyant and squiffy, twenty-three years old, and he was entirely alone, with hours still before sunset and no one to share them with.

The way to his digs took him out of the town, past the closed and overgrown yards of the old goods station, past the new secondary modern school, hard and transparent in the evening sun. Then he crossed into Marlborough Gardens, which was a loop, or noose, with one exit on to the main road. From the pavement he saw people eating in kitchens, or finished already and out in the garden, mowing and watering. The houses were a strange economy that there wasn't a word for, built in threes, two semis with the central house in common, like segments of a terrace. Mrs Marsh at least had an end house, with a view behind on to a field of barley. Her husband was a coach-driver, with odd hours, taking a party up to London, or sometimes away overnight on a run to Bournemouth or the Isle of Wight. Now she was in the front room with the curtains pulled against the sun and the box blaring it was the start of Z-Cars. She had a pleasant way of not bothering her lodger she turned her head and nodded; in the kitchen there was a ham salad for him under a cloth, and a redirected letter with a note saying 'This came for you, Mrs Marsh'. Paul went upstairs two at a time, used the bathroom, which was where he felt most a stranger, among the couple's shaving-soap and flannels, Mrs Marsh's other things in the cabinet. The bathroom had a frosted gla.s.s panel in the door, which showed if it was occupied at night, and made going to the lavatory especially seem audible and almost visible and even vaguely culpable. Paul's designated bath nights were Tuesday and Thursday: so tonight! Sat.u.r.days the bank worked through till one, then he would be off on the bus to Wantage, and his first week of work here would be over.

After his supper he went back upstairs and got down his diary from the top of the wardrobe. He had hardly made his mark on the room his slippers and dressing-gown, a few books he'd stuffed into his bag. He had the new Angus Wilson out of the library, and was getting through it in his own way, with a restless eye running ahead for the appearances of Marcus, the queer son, whose antics he pondered as if for portents or advice. He didn't want to read this at home and risk his mother asking questions. Also the latest Penguin Modern Poets, The Mersey Sound, which he didn't really think was poetry at all; and Poems of To-day, in fact published over fifty years ago, and full of things that he loved and knew by heart, such as Drinkwater's 'Moonlit Apples' and Valance's 'Soldiers Dreaming'. The room had a hard square armchair in p.r.i.c.kly moquette and up against the window a ladies' dressing-table with three mirrors and a stool, which was where Paul sat each night to do his writing. Whenever he looked up he saw himself, the Bryant nose in triumphant triplicate, his two profiles playing hide and seek with each other. He'd been keeping his diary since he left school, a top-secret record, and the volumes themselves, black quarto notebooks, were growing harder to hide as they ama.s.sed. At home he had a box under the bed in which old school projects and browning newsprint concealed a lower layer of private things, frail mementoes of boys at school, three issues of Manifique!, with muscle-men in posing pouches, sometimes clearly drawn on afterwards, and then the diaries themselves, in which Paul let himself go in a way that these publications weren't allowed to.

Now he leant forward, like a schoolboy shielding his work, and wrote: 'June 29th 1967: hot and sunny all day.'As he wrote he pressed very hard with his biro into the page, so that the paper itself seemed to spread and rise in a curl at the margins. When closed, the book showed exactly how much of it had been used up. The written pages, their edges crinkly and darkened, were a pleasing proof of industry, the rest of the book, clean, trim and dense, a pleasing challenge. This week had been rich in material, and he had summed up the girls at work and given Geoff Viner a franker appraisal than was possible in the bank itself. Now he had his chat with Geoff in the toilets to write up, and the whole unexpected adventure at 'Carraveen'. 'It turns out Mrs J was married to Dudley Valance, C's brother. But she also had big affair with Cecil V before WW1, said he was her first love, he was madly attractive but bad with women. I said what did she mean. She said, "He didn't really understand women, you know, but he was completely irresistible to them. Of course he was only 25 when he was killed." ' At the foot of the page, where the edge of his writing hand had rested, the greasy paper resisted the ink, and he had to go over some of the words twice: 'completely irresistible', he wrote again, 'only 25' the effect bold and clumsy, like the writing of someone who was still drunk or slightly mad.

2.

Peter Rowe came out of his room on the top floor, crossed the landing, and looked over the banister into the great square stairwell. Below him he could hear and then for a moment see a small boy hurrying downwards, saw a raised arm struggling into a jacket. 'Don't run!' Peter shouted, with such abrupt and G.o.dlike effect that the boy looked up in horror, lost his footing, and slid down b.u.mp b.u.mp b.u.mp on the hard oak treads into the hall. 'Now you know why,' Peter said, more quietly, and went back into his room.

He had the first period free, then it was the Fifth Form for singing. He filled his kettle at the basin, vaguely rinsed a mug for his Nescafe: the granules started melting and fizzing on the wet bottom. Then he lit himself a cigarette, first of the day, and squinting in the smoke tugged his bed up fairly straight and covered its irregularities with his rug. Along the corridor, he knew, Matron would be going from dorm to dorm, head down, breathing through her mouth. Wherever she found a bed improperly made, its corners loose, its top sheet less than taut, she stooped and tossed it, like a bull, made a total mess of it, and wrote the offending boy's name on a card. The card was then pinned on the board by the staff-room, and in break the delinquents would have to pant upstairs and set about making the whole thing again from scratch, square and smooth and tight as a strait-jacket. Peter felt a twinge of guilty relief at his exemption from this regime.

He started on his weekly letter to his parents, a practice he did keep up as strictly as the boys. 'Dearest Mum and Dad,' he wrote, 'What a beautiful week it has been. I'm glad, because it's the semi-final of the garden compet.i.tion on Sunday. The HM is to be the judge, and as he knows nothing at all about gardens it's hard to know what he'll be looking for, colour or "concept". The boy Dupont whom I've told you about has built a rockery with a waterfall, but the HM, who has very plain tastes, may find this too "fiddly". Besides that, things are building up nicely to Open Day. Colonel Sprague is very involved with organizing it all. He is true to type and rather a monster. I call him the Infolonel Colonel.' Peter smoked for a bit, and drank his coffee. He thought he probably couldn't divert his parents with the Headmaster's latest obsession, the spread of supposedly s.e.xy books among the higher forms. It was on the agenda for next week's staff-meeting. Already this term the HM had confiscated Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers, both on hearsay rather than any knowledge of their contents, which was doubtless why the boys themselves slogged through them. Dr No, found in Walters's tuck-box, had been pa.s.sed to Peter, as being possibly 'more broad-minded', for a judgement. He'd read it last night at a sitting and found three sentences in it unexpectedly arousing; of course he'd seen the film, which was much more exciting: on the page the plot looked slight and awkward, the whole thing explained by the villain himself in an enormous monologue. He noted a sort of tight-lipped sadism in the accounts of James Bond's body and the injuries inflicted on it, but as in a movie the wounds all healed by the scene after next. The boys, of course, in the first derangement of p.u.b.erty, could be 'turned on' by just about anything. Peter knew he had been so himself, and so saw the present purge as inherently futile. He stubbed out his cigarette, and told his parents instead about the First XI match against Beasleys.

At 9.35, with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable, Peter opened his door again and went out on to the landing. In the glance he gave back into his room he saw it as a stranger might, as an appalling mess. He went down one circuit of the main staircase, and set off along the broad first-floor corridor. The cla.s.srooms at Corley Court occupied six rooms on the ground floor, but the room with the piano was isolated, with the sick-bay, in the rambling far end of the floor above. Boys with temperatures or infectious diseases were hara.s.sed through the wall by ragged bursts of folksong or the torturous practice of scales. He pa.s.sed the Headmaster's sitting-room, which must once have been a princ.i.p.al bedroom of the house: its high Gothic oriel looked out down the axis of the formal gardens, which now survived only in photographs but had once been a dazzling floral maze. A melancholy fishpond at the centre of the lawn was all that was left.

Peter had got the Corley job in the middle of the year, after the clouded departure of a man called Holdsworth, and took to the house from the start, in part out of natural sympathy for something so widely abused. 'A Victorian monstrosity' was the smug routine phrase. He had heard a boy in the First Form opine that Corley Court was 'a Victorian monstrosity, and one of the very worst', with just the same humourless laugh the boy's father must have used when describing the place. In fact, the house was perfect for a boarding-school secluded, labyrinthine, faintly menacing, with its own tree-lined park now mown and marked out in pitches. No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an inst.i.tution of learning it was pretty much ideal. Peter had started to research its history. Last year he had signed a pet.i.tion to save St Pancras Station, and at Corley too he loved the polychrome brick and the fierce Gothic detail which were such an amusing challenge to more gracious notions of the English country house though the rooms inside, which had been altered between the wars, were disappointingly bright and inoffensive. Only the chapel, the library and the great oak staircase, with its shield-bearing wyverns on the newels, had completely escaped the hygienic clean-up of the 1920s. The library was useful as it was, and the chapel, a real High Victorian gem, was also the site of the school's strangest feature, the white marble tomb of the poet Cecil Valance.

Peter went into the sun-baked music-room and flung open the window; there was a pleasant sally of cool morning air over the sill. With a few kicks and long-armed tweaks he straightened the two rows of wooden chairs on the brown linoleum. The room's single adornment, above the blocked-off fireplace, was an oleograph of Brahms, 'Presented by his Family in Memory of N. E. Harding 193853'; Peter sometimes tried to imagine the family deciding on this particular gift.

He set the Acorn Songbook on the stand of the upright piano and went quickly through today's songs. Most of the boys couldn't read music, so it was a matter of drumming and coaxing the tune into them by remorseless repet.i.tion. They paid no more attention to the words than they did with hymns. The words were a given: high-flown, old-fashioned, accepted with a childish mixture of respect and complete indifference. Now the bell rang, the whole school held its breath, and then let go in a babble and clatter that rose dimly upstairs from the floor below. Again the momentary and instantly mastered sense of dread. He started playing 'Fur Elise', waiting for the noise beyond to particularize in the slap of sandals and knock at the door. He always let them catch him in mid-performance, and when he'd shouted 'Come in!' he carried on playing, imposing a nice uncertainty on the cla.s.s as to whether or not they could talk.

The piano was at right angles to the rows of boys, so he glanced at them along his left shoulder as he played. One day he meant to stun them with the Liszt Sonata, but for now he kept prudently to this simple piece, which some of the boys themselves played with Mrs Keeping; he was nearer their level than he intended to admit. 'Good morning,' he murmured, concentrating rather hard on the second section; one or two replied. The different forms had quite distinct atmospheres. He liked the Fifth Form, for their humour and ingenuity, and because it was clear that they liked him; sometimes the humour had to be kept in check. He stood up and looked at them, his frown as he went along the rows stirring odd gleams and doubts in their attentive faces. He was firm in suppressing any hint of favouritism, though he saw the flame of it rise expectantly in Dupont and Milsom 1.

'Well, my little song-birds,' said Peter, 'I hope you're all in the mood to make a din.'

'Yes, sir,' came a dutiful chorus.

'I asked you a question,' said Peter.

'Yes, sir!' came a l.u.s.tier sound, breaking into giggles. Peter gazed round the room in deep abstraction, at last noticing the boys and raising his eyebrows in mild anxiety: 'I'm sorry . . . did you say something?'

'YES! SIR!' they shouted, the laughter at this awful old gag contained by an undeniable excitement. The sense of being free to give a wildly corny performance was one of the pleasures of teaching in a prep-school. A great innocence was there to be tapped, even in the surlier and spottier boys, the nocturnal students of Peyton Place. Peter glanced past them, through the open window, at the wide hazy vista of fields and woods. It would be horribly shaming if Chris or Charlie or any of his London friends saw him carrying on like this, but the fact was the boys loved it.

'Let's have that in scales,' he said, going over and striking the A below middle C, and in his large unembarra.s.sed baritone, crescendo: 'Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Sir!' So the boys sang it, climbing inexorably through the keys, in rapid repeated climaxes of a.s.sent that soon became mere yapping syllables.

Peter started them off with 'The Saucy Arethusa', 'page 37 as you must surely know by now . . .' and as they were still finding the place he launched out with enormous relish on the first verse: 'Come all ye jolly sailors bold, Whose hearts are cast in honour's mould, While English glory I unfold' head shaking with the jolliness and boldness, chin tucked in for the gravelly descent on 'English glory', the risk of comedy brazened out: 'Hurrah for the Arethusa!' He felt he could sing to them all day. A hand was up, the feeble Peebles, as Colonel Sprague called him, had no book. 'Well, share with Ackerley, use your nous,' and then they were off. There was something Peter was expecting to happen, and he thought he would listen out for it and wait. For the moment he corrected nothing, the thing was to get them moving: 'Not a sheet or a tack or a brace did she slack . . .' They had sung the song every week this term and could belt it out with their strange uncaring glee; it was he himself, frowning over the piano, who sometimes forgot where they were and joined in furiously with the wrong words. 'And now we've driven the foe ash.o.r.e, Never to fight with Britons more' a reckless boast, overtaken in a moment by an immense ba.s.s crack in the air above the roof of the house, far away and right on top of them, so that the room shook and the piano itself gave out a faint jangling thrum. They broke off raggedly, then rushed to the window, but the plane was so far beyond them and moving so fast that they saw nothing. The great scientific fact seemed all the more eloquent and exemplary for that. On the back-drive below, the Headmaster too was standing and gazing at the sky over the tree-tops, his upper lip raised rodent-like as he squinted into the blue. 'Come on, back to your places,' said Peter carryingly, before the HM himself could do so; but in fact in the presence, or rather the immediate absence, of this sublime phenomenon, a minute's mutual wonder seemed to be allowed.

'Did you see it, sir?' Brookings called down. But the Headmaster shook his head, with a shifty smile, almost as if he'd missed it with his gun. Peter leant out above the three boys who were jammed in the open cas.e.m.e.nt. Though he thought the HM was a fool, he didn't want to be shown up by him, and the HM found fault in the most unaccountable things. He picked up f.a.g-ends, he brooded ingeniously on things he had misheard. Peter was a young master, far closer in age to the boys than the HM was to him. There was sometimes an imputation in the older man's tone that Peter himself must be kept in check. Now he said, 'They'd let me know this might happen,' something slightly absurd in half-shouting this at a first-floor window.

'Had they, sir?'

'Oh, yes: I'm in touch with the Commander at the Base. He keeps me in the picture.'

'What was it, sir?' said Brookings.

The Headmaster peered again at the sky, with a genially proprietary air. 'Well, back to your lessons, come on!' and nodding uncertainly at Peter he trudged on down the drive towards the garages.

'Anyone know what it was?' said Peter, as they took their places again; with their Airfix and their Biggles and their War Picture Libraries they lived a constant battle in the air.

'Was it a Hustler, sir?' said Sloane.

'Why would a Hustler make that noise?' said Peter, pretty sure he knew, but taking a donnish tone.

'Sonic boom, sir!' said several of the boys.

'So when we speak of a Hustler, what do we mean?' said Peter.

'It's a B-58 bomber, sir,' said Sloane, and someone else made a stupid booming noise. 'They can do Mach 2, and of course they carry a nuclear weapon, sir.'

'I hope they don't bomb us, sir,' said Peebles, with that utter feebleness that only provoked the others.

'I don't think we'd know much about it, if they did,' said Peter.

'The Americans don't just go round bombing people, you idiot,' said Milsom 1, to Peebles, not to Peter, though there was a slight sense of things getting out of hand.

'Right, where were we?' said Peter, and with a sudden intense boredom, that seemed the natural counterpart of his desire to be thorough and exciting: 'OK, I've had enough of the ruddy Arethusa, let's do something else. "Cherry Ripe", perhaps?'

'Oh, no, sir . . . !' There were sickened protests.

'Fine, fine . . . Fine, what about "Hearts of Oak".'

'Mm, all right, sir,' said Sloane, who was still exhilarated by the magic eruption of the sonic boom, and seemed to have promoted himself to cla.s.s leader, or bargainer.

' "Hearts of Oak" is a fine old song,' said Peter. 'Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer!' And a minute later he had them all at it.

Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men, We always are ready Steady, boys, steady!

and he joined them to stiffen up the sinew: 'We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again!' There was undoubtedly something wrong, but he got them into the next verse and shouting 'Keep going!' he left the piano and walked along just in front of the front row and then behind the back row, pausing and leaning in as if to share a confidence with each child. There was a standard place for giggles in this song, as reliable as some old music-hall gag, and Peter hardened his face against it: But should their flat bottoms in darkness get o'er Still Britons they'll find to receive them on sh.o.r.e.

'Yes, thank you very much, Prowse 2,' said Peter. 'Sing on, sing on!' As a master, one could make the boys laugh, but one couldn't be made to laugh by them in cla.s.s it meant a notable loss of authority, and out of cla.s.s it was oddly too intimate. Even so, the sheer idiocy of their jokes could be hard to resist.

'Aha!' he said, 'yes, I thought as much.' He sounded much more bad-tempered than he really meant. Poor Dupont coloured up and dried up too, but Peter had got the proof he needed. The singing trailed off at the promise of an incident, less exciting than a sonic boom but with a human interest that had them all peering round in happy relief that someone else was in trouble. It had happened before in the first week of term red-headed Macpherson had been sent out smirking and shrugging into his new freedom. 'Just give me the first verse,' said Peter. Dupont stared at him with a mixture of anxiety and indignation he hadn't seen before; cleared his throat; and then started singing, very quietly, 'Come, cheer up, my lads . . .' in a voice that wouldn't obey him. There were sn.i.g.g.e.rs from along the row, and Peter supported him, nodding firmly, holding his eye ''Tis to glory we steer, To add something more to this wonderful year . . .' Dupont burning red and looking away as the tune cracked and lurched out of control 'Ah well I'm sorry,' said Peter, and pursed his lips in friendly regret. In the front row Morgan-Williams uttered a croaky warble. Peter ignored the laughter that followed. 'It will happen to you too,' he said, 'we'll all enjoy laughing at you then.' He went back to the piano. But he sensed something more was in the air. When he sat down, and turned to look at them, Dupont was still hovering at the end of the row. Peter smiled at him, to say goodbye, a little flash of favouritism after all in a way it was cause for congratulation, like being confirmed. He would soon settle down, in the Sixth Form next term, long trousers, a teenage voice, he could hear him already. Milsom 1 was looking with furrowed interest at his friend. Sloane said, 'You're meant to go, Dupe.' Dupont's mortification made Peter himself feel uncomfortable. This clever and unusual child felt for the first time like a figure of fun, perhaps, or of superst.i.tion, sent out awkwardly into the future on the other boys' behalf. 'You can go and read in the library, if you like,' said Peter, which properly was a Sixth Form privilege. Still, there was a crackle of mockery as Dupont went smiling through his blushes to the door.

3.

Paul leant forward, raised the bra.s.s bolt, and opened the little doors of his position. In less than a minute the bank itself would open; through the frosted gla.s.s in the lower half of the windows the grey shapes of three or four waiting customers could be seen outside, blurred and overlapping. But for now the Public s.p.a.ce was deserted, its dark linoleum unscuffed, the ashtrays sparkling, the ink-wells full, The Times and the Financial Times untouched on the table. There was something beautiful in the sheer old-fashioned dullness of the place. On the notice-board above the table were advertis.e.m.e.nts for 5% Defence Bonds and Premium Savings Bonds, and under a bold sans-serif heading a statement on 'BANK RAIDS' which lent the Public s.p.a.ce its one note of possible excitement.

Already he and Geoff had emptied the Night Deposit Safe, and spent a friendly ten minutes checking the contents of the locked leather wallets. As the bank closed at three, most shopkeepers dropped off their takings later, in the swivelling chute of the safe. Counting and entering the paid-in cash and cheques was the first task of the day. Geoff counted money with eye-puzzling speed, the rubber thimble on his right forefinger pulsing over the notes. Paul was lightly distracted by the sense of compet.i.tion, as well as by Geoff's sleepy but determined morning presence, hair still damp, aftershave new and sharp. He sighed and started on a batch again. Mrs Marsh had reduced his military bandage to a neat pad at the base of his thumb, but he still felt clumsy and went cautiously. Ten-shilling notes were the dirtiest and most torn, and had sometimes to be set aside. Ten-pound notes he always took more slowly, out of respect. Susie had asked him about his bandage, and the story of last night had come out and given him a first enjoyable taste of being a character, with comical adventures. He heard her say, 'Did you hear what happened to young Paul?'

There were three positions on the counter Jack nearest the door from the street, Geoff in the centre, and Paul waiting to be discovered at the far end, closest to the Manager's office. Geoff was informally keeping an eye on Paul, and Paul even more informally, in fact quite furtively, was keeping an eye on Geoff. It was absurd to have a thing about Geoff, but there he was all day long, on view, in his tight-fitting suit and zip-up ankle-boots with built-up heels hooked over the bar of his stool. Mr Keeping made sardonic allusions to Geoff's boots, but didn't actually ban them. Among the girls, too, at their desks and typewriters behind them, Geoff's looks were a bit of a joke, one of those jokes that of course allowed them to be talked about. Paul felt no such freedom. When they ribbed Geoff about Sandra, the girl he was seeing from the National Provincial, it was Paul who blushed and felt his pulse quicken at the curiosity in the air. He imagined being kissed by Geoff, suddenly but inevitably, in the staff-room Gents, and then Geoff 'Opening!' said Hannah, as the front door was unlocked, and with a flutter of nerves Paul sat back on his stool and squared his hands on the counter in front of him.

His first customer was a farmer paying in cheques and drawing a large cash sum for his men's wages Fridays were heavily to do with paying wages and banking the week's takings, alarming queues building up while he tallied fifty or sixty cheques. Hundreds of pounds could pa.s.s through his window at a time. He felt the farmer, George Hethersedge, was treating him as a bit of a fool for never having seen him before. He seemed to suggest he would look back on this moment of ignorance with rueful embarra.s.sment. Paul had a rough sense, as he counted the notes and totted up the cheques on his adding-machine, that the name Hethersedge had implications, a weight and a place in the light and shade of local opinion. Like many of these quick-set local names, it also had a terrifying overdraft attached to it. He saw how strange it was, in normal social terms, for him to know this. This slight social awkwardness seemed to lie at the heart of their professional relations.

Quite hidden by Mr Hethersedge was a little old lady, Miss M. A. Lane, whose hand trembled and who seemed distraught by the business of cashing a cheque for 2. She peeped at Paul through the sc.r.a.p of coa.r.s.e veil on the front of her hat. He liked old people, and enjoyed her anxious respect and even slight fear of him as a quick-witted official. Then there was Tommy Hobday, the chemist from next door, who was in and out all the time and knew his name; and then the little shock of contact and novelty began to dull, and his own fear, of error or exposure, subsided slowly into the routine of a very busy day. Inside the front door was a shallow lobby with a further gla.s.s door that had a tightly sprung closer the snap and swallow of the closer announced the incessant unrhythmical coming and going of the customers.

Just before lunch Paul heard a voice in the Public s.p.a.ce, and sensed a small commotion with it now Miss Cobb had appeared and was speaking in a strange delighted tone like someone at a party: then the voice again, sharply gracious, Mrs Keeping, of course, 'No, no, no, absolutely,' pretending not to demand attention, people glancing round. Paul's customer went, leaving him with a clear view of her, in a pale blue frock with a white handbag and looking quite like someone at a party herself. She had picked up the Financial Times and was scanning the headlines, her hard black eyebrows raised. Paul watched her nervously, from his ambiguous position, both invisible and on show. She looked up over the page, ran her eye abstractedly across the room, but gave no sign at all of seeing him. He let the smile fade from his face as if preoccupied by something else, his heart quickening for a minute in a muddle of protest and shame. When the lobby door opened she turned slightly and nodded. In a moment Paul saw Mrs Jacobs, with her heavy tread and humorous questing look, come into view, peer across at him and then approach, 'Now then . . .' dumping her tapestry bag on the counter between them.

'Good morning, madam,' Paul said almost humorously, unsure if he should use her name.

'Good morning,' said Mrs Jacobs, genial, rummaging, perhaps herself unaware who he was. Out on to the counter came gla.s.ses case, head-scarf, twenty Peter Stuyvesants, a paper bag from Hobday's with the rattle of tablets, an orange paperback upside-down, a novel . . . Paul couldn't quite see . . . at last a cheque-book. Then the changing of the gla.s.ses, the puzzled reach for the pen. She wrote her cheque in a raffish, off-hand way, keeping up a vague air of absurdity, as if money were an amusing mystery to her. Paul smiled patiently back, scanned and stamped the cheque, which was for 25, and asked her how she would like it. It was only then, with a brief stare, that she took in who he was. 'Oh, you're you!' she said, in a jolly tone but none the less placing him, as the funny little man of the night before, whose name she had probably forgotten. Paul smiled as he leant over the cash drawer by his left knee, freed a bundle of clean green oners from its paper wrapper. Rather lovely, it seemed to him, the fine mechanical sameness of the Queen's face under his counting fingers. He counted them out again for her, at a pace she could follow 'There you are, Mrs Jacobs.'

'And your hand, yes,' she said, confirming it was him. Paul raised it to show the dressing, and wiggled his fingers to show it was working.

'Good for you,' said Mrs Jacobs, finding her purse, and cramming the notes into it again as if she found money somewhat unmanageable. 'It's our young man,' she murmured to her daughter as she rejoined her; but she herself was now murmuring to Mr Keeping, who had emerged from his office, with his trilby in his hand and his raincoat over his arm, despite the cloudless splendour of the sky as seen through the clear upper halves of the bank windows. Paul supposed they were going to walk him home.

Today he had a late lunch-break, which he preferred he had the staff-room to himself and read his Angus Wilson over his sandwich without anyone asking questions; and when he got back, it was only an hour to closing time. In the afternoons he felt more confined, on his high stool, swivelling fractionally between the deep cash drawer by his left knee and the wooden bowls of pins, paper-clips and rubber-bands on the counter to the right. Where he'd felt purposeful and efficient in the morning he now felt stiff and disenchanted. The cash drawer boxed him in. His knees were raised, the b.a.l.l.s of his feet taut against the metal foot-rest, his thighs spread as he leant forwards; he jiggled his knees for relief from the numbness in his upper thighs and b.u.t.tocks. The low curved back to the stool nodded forward if it wasn't leant on; though it turned upwards nicely when he pressed and arched against it. He got a faint tingling, an odd compound of numbness and arousal, in the hidden zone between the legs. Queues formed in front of him, with their shuffle of private faces vacant, amiable, accusing, resigned glimpsed only by him, and half the time he had a half-erection, seen by no one, caused by no one, under the counter.

Just before closing he came back to his seat from the chief clerk's desk, and found that he had no customers he glanced out, saw Heather cross the Public s.p.a.ce to stand by the door, and sensed already the little shift of perspective that would come about when she locked it shut, and the team were left alone again. Perhaps it was just a new boy's self-consciousness, but he felt a mood of solidarity settled on the staff when the public had gone. They barely showed it, of course 'No, you're just in time!' said Heather, with a grudging laugh, and Paul saw a large young man scoot in past her, smiling keenly, though in fact it was 3.28, he was within his rights, and the smile expressed confidence more than apology. He was feeling in his breast pocket, his smile now slightly mischievous as he homed in on Geoff's position, where a customer was already waiting. Paul had an impression of quirky liveliness and scruffiness, such as you didn't see much in a town like this, something artistic and a little preoccupied, more like a person from London or it could be Oxford, only fifteen miles away. He could well be an Oxford type, with his pale linen jacket curling at the lapels and his blue knitted tie. A pen had made a red ink stain, not far from his heart. His dark curly hair half-covered his ears, there was something witty and attractive in his expression, though he wasn't exactly handsome. Paul leant forward and for a few expanded, trance-like seconds watched him gazing at Geoff, over the shoulder of the man in front of him. His head was on one side, with the vacantly calculating frown of impatience, the tip of his tongue on his lower lip; and then, just for a moment, his face stiffened, his eyes widened as if to fill themselves with Geoff, and then narrowed into a slow blink of amused indulgence; and of course Paul knew, and his heart thumped with feelings he couldn't disentangle, of curiosity, envy and alarm. 'Can I help you?' he said, and his own voice sounded loud and almost mocking.

The man looked at him without moving his head, and then with a widening smile, as if he knew he'd been caught out. He came over. 'h.e.l.lo,' he said, 'you're new!'

'Yes, I'm the new boy,' said Paul, pleasantly, and feeling a bit silly.

The man looked at him appreciatively as he felt in his breast pocket. 'Well, me too,' he said, his voice quick and deep, with a curl of humour in it.

'Oh, yes?' said Paul, wary of being too familiar, but laughing a little.

'Well, new master, but it's much the same. Now I've got to pay this in for the Colonel.' He had a paying-in book, the slip all made out, and a cheque for 94: Corley Court School, General Account. Paul saw, in the moment he stamped it, an image of the school, teeming and condensed, wealthy and famous, he was sure, though he had never heard of it.

'Where is it, actually?' he said.

'What, Corley?' the man said the word as one might London, perhaps, or Dijon, with cultured certainty and polite surprise. 'It's out on the Oxford road, about three miles away. It's a prep-a-ra-turry school,' he said, in a Noel Coward voice.

'The bank is about to close, ladies and gentlemen!' announced Heather.

'Look, you'd better give me some money,' said the man. 'Don't they have drinking-up time in here?'

'Afraid not,' said Paul, with a nod and a smile, in the way one always conceded a customer might have a point; but with some further concession of this one's charm. The man looked at him acutely for a moment before getting out his pen; he had one of those thick biros with four different colours, red, green, black and blue. He wrote a cheque for 5, in neat but imaginative writing, having chosen the green ink. His name was P. D. Rowe. Peter Rowe in the signature.

'End of the month,' he said, 'we're paid today.'

'How would you like it?'

'Oh, G.o.d . . . four pound notes and a pound in silver. Yes,' said Peter Rowe, as he watched, nodding his head, 'time to go really wild this weekend.'

Paul t.i.ttered without looking at him, and then said, 'Where can you go wild round here, I wonder?' very quietly, as he really didn't want Susie to hear him.

'Hmm, yes, I take your point,' said Peter Rowe. Paul felt oddly conscious of at last having a personal conversation, as the other cashiers did with the customers they knew, and though he didn't know Peter Rowe at all, he was very interested in the answer. 'I always think there must be something going on, don't you?' He received the money and slid the coins into a D-shaped leather purse he had. 'Though in a little place like this, it may take some finding.' He smiled, with a flicker of eyebrows.

Paul heard himself saying, 'Well, let me know!' Whatever this going wild entailed had only the vaguest form in his head, and his excitement was mixed with a feeling he was out of his depth.

'Okay, I will,' said Peter Rowe. As he crossed the Public s.p.a.ce he glanced in at Geoff again with another little flicker of comic surmise, which Paul felt in a horrified rush of understanding was meant as a sign to him too, and then looked back with a flash of a grin as he went out through the door.

On the way home Paul thought about Peter Rowe and wondered if he'd see him again straight away in the town. But most of the shops were shut and the pubs not yet open and a mood of premature vacancy had settled on the sun-raked length of Vale Street. He felt weary but restless, shut out from the normal play of a Friday night. All down the street, house-doors were protected by striped awnings, or stood open behind bead curtains to let in the air. He caught radio talk, music, a man raising his voice as he went into another room. The drapers and outfitters had covered their shop-windows with cellophane to keep the goods from bleaching in the sun. It was the sugary gold of the cellophane on a bottle of Lucozade, and changed all the clothes inside into unappealing greens and greys. On the tiny stage of Mews' window a woman stepped forward, through the amber light, in a cotton frock, her blank face and pointed fingers raised in genteel animation; while a man stood dependably, in flannels and a cravat, with an endlessly patient smile. They had been like that all week, flies buzzing and dying at their feet, and would surely remain there till the season changed, when one day the peg-board screen behind would shift, and a living arm come groping through. Paul went on, glancing unhappily at his strolling reflection. In the chemists' window there were those enormous tear-shaped bottles of murky liquid, blue, green or yellow, which must have some ancient symbolic function. Dim sediment gathered in them. He wondered what happened at a wild weekend he saw Peter dancing to 'Twist and Shout' with a roomful of friends from Oxford. Perhaps he was going to Oxford for the party; a preparatory school was hardly the place for a rave-up. He didn't fancy Peter, he felt slightly threatened by him, and saw their friendship stirring suspicions in the bank. Already he seemed to be a week or two ahead.

After supper he went up to write his diary, but felt oddly reluctant to describe his own mood. He lay on the bed, staring. He wrote, 'Mrs Keeping came into the bank before lunch, but she totally ignored me, it was quite emb. Mr K v cool too, and only said he hoped my hand was all right. Also Mrs Jacobs took ages to realize who I was, though then she was reasonably friendly. She drew out 25. I don't think she could remember my name, she referred to me as "our young man".' Something about the clashing curtains and the carpet, both nice enough in themselves, made Paul feel acutely lonely, the three mirrors of the dressing-table blocking the evening sun. The bulb in the ceiling light glowed in weak compet.i.tion with it. There was the matching suite, dressing-table, wardrobe, bed with quilted headboard, and then nothing that went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by Mr Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment. Paul started on a sentence about Peter Rowe coming into the bank, but a superst.i.tious impulse made him cross it out after three or four words. He blocked out the words with his biro till the place shone.

He put the diary away and felt on the top of the wardrobe for the copy of Films and Filming that he'd hidden there. There was a still on the cover from the new film Privilege, starring Jean Shrimpton and Paul Jones. They seemed to be in bed together. Jean Shrimpton's pale profile hovered over Paul Jones, whose eyes were closed, and his lips, and teeth, slightly parted. At first Paul had thought she must be watching him sleep, too entranced by his pretty face to want to wake him. Then he'd guessed, with a strange p.r.i.c.kly rush, that they must be making love, and that the pop-star's open mouth wasn't snoring but gasping in surrender. Though actually you couldn't be sure. There was a suggestion of his naked shoulder and chest, and thus of other things you might get to see if you went to the film. It wouldn't come here, of course, he'd have to go into Swindon or Oxford on the bus. In the angle between the two faces there was a disconcerting limb, perhaps Jean's right arm crooked back insect-like as she crouched over him, or maybe Paul Jones's own left elbow, oddly twisted. He saw for the first time it could be his left wrist, much closer, the hand hidden in Jean's hair. In the grey and white close-up Paul Jones's puppyish neck looked fleshy and pitted. Also he had no ear-lobes, a weird thing you couldn't entirely overlook once you'd noticed it. Paul Bryant wasn't sure about Paul Jones. His mother had fancied him quite openly once, on Top of the Pops, and you couldn't very easily share a fantasy with your mother. His own desire, in its way very modest, was simply to kiss Paul Jones.

He sat propped up on the bed to look through the small ads for the third or fourth time. It was like a mild hallucination, or one of those drawings in the paper containing ten hidden objects: it made him shiver to see the concealed invitations. He went systematically through Services, domestic work sought by 'refined young men' in 'private flats and houses', or by 'masculine' odd-job men, 'anything considered'. He wasn't seeking Services himself, but he was keenly preoccupied by their being offered. There were various ma.s.seurs. Someone called Mr Young, a 'manipulative therapist', could visit between 10.45 and 3 in north-west London only. Paul felt he would be rather intimidated by Mr Young, even if he managed to be in the area at the specified time. His eye worked through the tiny type of 'For Sale and Wanted', the ads all looking alike, so that you could lose one and find it again with a slightly magical sense of significance. Mainly it was magazines and films. There were hysterical pleas: 'Stills, Photos, Articles, Magazines, ANYTHING dealing with Cliff Richard'. An unnamed 'studio' offered 'physique and glamour movies' for 'artists, students and connoisseurs', someone else sold '50-foot action films', however long that was. Paul imagined the reel going round on a projector . . . he didn't think you could get much action into fifty feet, it would surely be over in no time. Anyway, he didn't have a projector; and couldn't see himself getting one on his present salary. Not that there would really be room in here . . . and then he'd need a screen as well . . . Quite a few people were fans of something called 'tapespond-ing', where it seemed you recorded a message and sent it through the post, which might be romantic, but then he didn't have a tape-recorder either, and even if he did Mrs Marsh would think he'd gone mad, talking away for hours on end in his room. He wasn't a very confident talker, and couldn't imagine how he'd fill up a tape.

The Personals were the climax of his solitary ritual, the words themselves bulging and bending with outrageous meaning: 'Undisciplined bachelor (32) would like to meet strong-minded person with modern outlook.' 'Motorcyclist, ex-Navy, seeks another for riding weekends.' It was 6d a word, but some people went on as garrulously as any tapesponder: 'Motorcyclist, 30, but still a novice, seeks further instruction and would also particularly like to contact a qualified watersports trainer. North London/Hertfordshire area preferred.' Paul read all this with a beating pulse, smiling narrowly, in a sustained state of fascinated shock. Only one man seemed to have completely missed the point, and asked to meet a girl with an interest in gardening. Otherwise it was a world of 'bachelors', many of them with 'flats', and most of those flats in London. 'Central London flat, large and comfortable. Young bachelor needed to share with another. No restrictions.' Paul looked up at the floral curtains and the evening sky above the mirror. 'Energetic bachelor (26), own flat, seeks others, similar interests' he hadn't said what his interests were, it must be taken as read. 'Interests cinema, theatre, etc', said some, or just 'interests varied'. 'Interests universal', said 'bachelor, late forties', leaving nothing, or was it everything, to chance.

Paul closed his eyes in a heavy-hearted dream of bachelor flats, his gaze slowly making out, among the pools of lamplight, the shared sofa, the muddled slippers, the advanced pictures, opening the door on to the bathroom, where he himself was shaving as Peter Rowe, now looking oddly like Geoff Viner, lolled in the bath, reading, smoking and washing his hair all at the same time, then opening, through a sort of purple vapour, the door of the bedroom, on to a shadowy scene more thrilling and scandalous than anything described in Films and Filming in fact a scene that, as far as he knew, had never been described at all.

4.

Peter sat in the Museum, writing up the labels with his four-coloured biro. 'Whose is the sword, again?'

'Oh, the sword, sir? Brookson's, sir,' said Milsom 1, coming over and watching intently for a moment.