Lord Dismiss Us (5 page)

Allen blushed, but looked him straight in the eyes.

‘Yes.’

There was understanding. First the broken window, and now this.

Mr Brownlow.

As Carleton passed the Music Building and made his way down the slope towards the cricket-field, Mr Brownlow came horribly alive.

Extra Latin in Mr Brownlow’s room, on Mr Brownlow’s knee. Exercises corrected up at Mr Brownlow’s desk; in front of the whole class, and no one knows that Mr Brownlow’s left hand is on one’s bottom. A sense of being special, and privileged, and yet rather awful at the very same time. Such a damp and fleshy hand. He could bend his thumb right back, and was proud of it! He would do it for you, not knowing that while it was jolly clever it also looked nasty.

The never-to-be-forgotten smell of T.C.P. Little cuts and bruises. After rugger he said – ‘You’ll need something on that.’ He didn’t mean – ‘go to Matron’. He meant – ‘come up to my room.’

Seated on Mr Brownlow’s well-cut blue shorts and bare knees, in front of a one-barred electric stove, glowing red. Mr Brownlow bending over in hairy white rugby club sweater and dabbing on T.C.P. Great gentleness and delicacy in those soft hands. He said he had wanted to be a doctor.

‘Whose are you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oh, come now, Terence. At home, you’re your parents’. Whose are you here?’

‘Yours.’

Sense of comfort, and being honoured. But uneasy as well. A bit frightening. What the dickens was it all about? Was it ‘wrong’? One couldn’t certainly mention it at home, but that meant nothing. Or to other masters. But, after all, it was private.

‘There’s only one person I could ever marry.’

‘Oh.’

‘You know who that is, don’t you?’

‘My sister?’

A good guess.

‘Right.’

‘She’s coming for me on Sunday. I could introduce you.’

‘We’ll see. Blast, there’s that pest, Thatcher coming across the Yard. I’m afraid you’ll have to slip out this way, or he’ll knock the house down.’

Raises my hand, and kisses the back of it. Holds out his own. I take the soft hand and kiss the back of it. But not comfortably. Something funny. He is a grown-up man.

Smell of T.C.P. off Thatcher!

But Thatcher doesn’t know he’s been called a pest.

Thatcher in dorm: – ‘Mr Brownlow calls me “Bruce” when I’m up in his room.’

‘So what! He calls me “Henry”.’

I stay quiet. Just shows how little they feel and how little he feels, that they make public boasts. It’s simply not the same thing at all.

Four ugly boys stay quiet too. They’ve never been asked up to his room. Are they jealous? Ugly boys are never anything. They are just out of things, that’s all.

‘He gave me three with the bristly side of the brush, Whew! It hurt! He said it was for my own good and he wouldn’t bother to do it for anyone else.’

‘Sucks to you! He twice gave me four. He likes it.’

He will never beat me.

No, and when he starts tremendous shouts at the Class, he’ll often shout at Thatcher and Woodgrove. It’s terrifying, but not, in a way, because I know he’ll never shout at me.

Best of all – the long summer evenings, on half-holidays, with bat and ball. The two of us away in some corner of the cricket-field. He bowls to me – all kinds of spins. I bowl to him. For hour after hour. Nobody pays any attention. Nobody ever even makes a single remark. It is accepted. Boys come over with questions – ‘Can I do this, can I do that, Sir?’ – and are sent away. Alien beings. I would never call him ‘Sir’. The warm evening goes on for ever. It is perfect.

And now it is all horrible. Why? From the very moment of leaving Glen Court it was horrible. Why? Not just because one heard they’d sacked him for it, and he went into Business, and was caught stealing, and a Criminal Picture was completed.

Dr Rowles came to watch a cricket match, and meet the boys who would eventually be going into his House at Weatherhill. Spread himself out on a rug beside me. Kindly, and made us all laugh, shyly. Smoked a pipe. Smell of heavy tweed jacket. Strong hand. The watch was buried in amazing hairs. He was older, of course, but he also seemed more . . . fatherly. He had more . . . he was bigger. As, of course, one would expect. Public schools were huge, unknown and important. A Housemaster would be almost a great man. Certainly compared with here.

Somehow one knew that Mr Brownlow was only for Prep Schools.

‘Time for bed, Terence.’

‘Oh no! . . . I wish we could be in the same bed.’

Mr Brownlow must have paused for a second.

‘So do I, my dear. But I’m afraid we can’t. I’ll be round later. Your turn tonight, isn’t it?’

In Mr Brownlow’s week of switching out the lights, he sat on a different bed each night and talked and told stories for a while. So did the other masters, but sometimes they would say ‘not tonight’, and everyone groaned. But Mr Brownlow was never going out anywhere, and never let them down. Also, he was the only one who put out the lights
before
they all talked – which was much better.

Thatcher and Woodgrove jumping up and down on their beds. ‘It’s my turn, Sir, it’s my turn, Sir!’

‘Get into your beds. You know perfectly well it isn’t.’

He switches out the lights, and with nervous delight I hear him coming over.

Worrying sometimes that it could possibly be the same with
Thatcher – horrible name, Bruce – because one can’t see in the dark.
But it couldn’t, it couldn’t. Thatcher would be bound to boast. And anyhow it’s not the same with the others. Well, for one thing, he only
sits
on the other beds. One can see that, even in the dark.

He kind of half lies on mine, up on the pillow beside me, with his head against the wall . . . (there’s a hair oil mark above my bed only) . . . and his left hand comes in and works its way inside the back of my pyjamas, while he is talking – and none of them know – and he takes my bottom between finger and thumb and gives it a gentle pinch. Which is comforting, and flattering, and at the very same time somehow not entirely pleasant.

But this night, right in the middle of some reminiscence of ‘Berry & Co.’ or ‘Father Brown’ or whatever it was, Mr Brownlow stops dead, for it seems several minutes, and there is a queer kind of tremor all over him beside me, and then he talks on, in a funny voice at first. Frightening, and horrible, and absolutely no explanation. But somehow one knows that one could never ask him. Perhaps he’s really a very nervous person, and has some awful worry occasionally, and gets this horrible shudder, and for once one was present when it happened.

‘I’ve had a wonderful letter, Terence.’

Dear Mr Brownlow,

I’ve been meaning to write to you for some time, because I owe you a real debt of gratitude. My son, Terence, has many times mentioned your name, and it is plain to me that you are proving an absolute boon to him as an adult companion at his school. He has always grown up among adults, and I was very much afraid that he would terribly miss their company, and in particular their conversation, at school. (‘As I expected, he is a little scornful of his contemporaries!’) It is frightfully valuable to a child of his intelligence. I see now that I need not have worried – and that is entirely due to you. Thank you so much for appreciating him and giving him the great benefit of your company.

In gratitude,

Mary Carleton.

I wonder if Allen’s mother ever wrote to Mr Brownlow.

The small cricket-field was very much an artificial creation, in the sense that it had been built at much labour and expense right out of the slope, like a promontory. Once on the field, you could not see the lake below unless you walked over to the far side and looked down on it over the railings. The lake, too, was artificial, and had provided an uninterrupted vista from the Big House until an eminent Victorian divine decided to turn it into a school for the sons of gentlemen, who would naturally need a cricketfield.

The Pavilion sat on the slope above, and from it stone steps descended to the green expanse. Carleton paused at the top and saw that four Nets were in use.

‘Come along, now, Carleton boy!’ called out Jimmy Rich, and he ran up to bowl. It was funny to watch the little steps, the twinkling feet, the speed of this extremely heavy man, as he rushed forward with swoops of black hair bobbing on his head and bowled hard, crying out instantly on the ‘clock’ of the bat – ‘Head down, boy! Keep that head down! Left elbow up!’ Already he had collected the ball, licked his thumb, and was walking away fast, left-right, left-right, left-right, preparatory to delivering it again.

There were about fifteen older boys at the four Nets. ‘You’re off to play ball with your friends,’ Johns had mocked. And the fact was that Carleton’s position was unique. Not one of these fellows was in the Sixth Form. (There was a Form called Remove, tactfully interspersed between Fifth and Sixth for boys too old to be seen in the Fifth, and insufficiently intelligent to attain the Sixth). Carleton felt alien. They were what Johns would call ‘Hearties’. They respected Carleton – it was the same at rugger, and hockey, in the other terms – but he was not one of them, and always a little uncomfortable when they were together.

On the other hand, among the novice writers, painters, musicians, and the learned, Carleton was not entirely at home either. The inevitable scorn of Games, indeed of the School itself, seemed to him obvious, boring and mean-minded. They considered themselves Sensitives, as against Hearties, but very few of them were. They took pale, glum boys for walks and communed about the place as a prison from which they awaited escape; and this was unattractive.

Carleton was the ‘typical’ all-rounder public school boy; except that he was in no way typical at Weatherhill. Perhaps at larger schools there really were all-rounders. Here he was almost alone.

At the same time, since he enjoyed Work and enjoyed Games, he was greatly enjoying School.

And this was marvellous – after a whole year! Laying his cap and blazer on the stone parapet; and rolling up his sleeves; and walking out on to the sweet-smelling, springy grass; and picking up one of the many old cricket-balls that were lying around; and running up to bowl to a boy with crinkly blond hair and a rather crinkly old man’s face, who was known, with good reason, as Sexy Sinnott. It was meant to be an off-break, but it was a full toss and Sinnott, a middling bat, hooked it hard into the netting.

The fact was that he had just thought, with an odd twinge of nervousness, that he had better give Jimmy Rich warning.

It was not easy to interrupt the flow, and Rich had bowled two more balls before he gained his attention.

‘Jimmy. . . .’ (he was the only staff member addressed by his christian-name). . . . ‘I told one of the New Boys he could come down. Allen.’

‘Ah, Carleton, boy. I’ve no time for kids today. I’ll have a look at them tomorrow.’

‘He’s not. He’s older. . . .’ He was going to say, ‘He was at Eton,’ but, strangely, it seemed a betrayal. ‘I believe he’s quite good.’ (An absolute fabrication. Why?)

‘All right. All right.’

Carleton bowled another off-break at Sinnott, and it went wide. Jimmy Rich didn’t see. Suppose the boy was no good at all. Why had he put himself in such a situation?

In silence, all fifteen of them went about the business of bowling and batting. Not a sound out of these noisy fellows. Not a sound except the ‘dunk’ of the ball on the matting, the ‘clock’ of the bat, and shouted advice from Jimmy Rich. This was about the only thing that they took seriously. So did Carleton. He felt in harmony, as long as they were quiet. He was concentrating now, and bowled Sinnott with a perfect leg-break, and was taken by surprise when he saw Allen, dressed in white, (he wasn’t entitled to a blazer), carrying a bat and coming down the steps.

He felt that alarming sense of responsibility again. Several of the bowlers had stopped, and somebody said, in an unpleasant tone, ‘What’s this?’ Unfortunately, Jimmy Rich wasn’t looking. So he had to go over to the boy and say, ‘Come along.’

‘Jimmy, this is Allen I was telling you about.’

‘Hullo young man, do you bowl or bat?’

‘A bit of both, Sir.’

‘And which would be the better, now?’

‘Um . . . batting I think, Sir.’

‘Right. Put on those pads and we’ll have a look at you. What are you slobs standing around for? Get on with it.’

Carleton caught a glance, accompanied by an odd little whistle, from a lout called Merryman.

‘What’s the matter with
you
, Merryman?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said Merryman, and he grinned.

Allen was having trouble with one of the straps. But Carleton could not possibly help him. He was in suspense. He could not understand why.

‘All right, come on out of that, Sinnott,’ called Rich from the neighbouring Net.

‘Oh Jimmy, for Christ’s sake, I’ve only had about five minutes!’

‘Come out when I tell you, boy! And mind that language or I’ll thrash it out of you. Go on up there, Allen, and we’ll throw a few balls at you.’

Looking sulky, and dragging his bat, Sinnott came down the matting. They passed mid way. He studied Allen up and down, and then looked at Carleton. He glanced back at Allen, over his shoulder, and looked meaningfully at Carleton again. Carleton ignored it.

The strange fact was that until this moment he had not noticed that Allen was very attractive. Up at the school he had been impressed by the boy’s calm, and straight look, by the fact that he had lost both father and brother, and was able to say so, just like that; and especially by his admitting about the money. They never spoke of money. To confess to a shortage at home was downright extraordinary. But, being long accustomed to the sight of good-looking boys, he had not even noticed it. Carleton’s ability at Work
and Games had kept him far too occupied to be amorous in any serious sense. How people looked had never been a conscious interest,
when they looked well.

But this boy was dazzling – black hair, brows, eyelashes, white teeth, a pinky-brown complexion. . . . Ridiculous. Were they all noticing it?

He had surely sat on Mr Brownlow’s knee. Horrible.

Jimmy Rich bowled a slow one. Allen seemed nervous, but he stopped it with a straight bat. And he did the same with balls of good length from two
1
st Eleven fellows; and another from Jimmy Rich.