Portobello Notebook (4 page)

SOMETIMES
on summer evenings he walked up to the cricket ground, a place where he could sit and think. Anyone could go there but few did unless there was a big game – when the West Indies played, it had been like a rock concert, with girls crowding about the big dusky stars. This evening the benches were empty. A few members sat outside the pavilion, drinking beer. He walked around the boundary rope to where the sun shone longest, down by the chestnut trees. Swifts, those birds that do not like the country, skimmed screaming over the surrounding rooftops. Beyond were the Dublin hills, green rising into blue. The town-hall clock struck a quarter hour in its grave tones. As a boy he had heard it from his bed at night. In the end he hadn’t moved far.

The groundsman stood to chat about the dry weather …
sparrows
pecking fibre from the boundary rope. There was a shout from the wicket – the middle stump was down. The umpire raised his finger, and a batsman made the lonely walk. One of the fielders
lay on his back, arms outspread. The others stood in a white huddle while the next bat padded up.

‘Who’s playing?’

‘The Thirds and Westmeath.’ The groundsman strolled on.

The new bat hacked the crease and took his stance. Someone said, ‘Bill,’ and threw the ball to a middle-aged man with his shirt collar standing up at the back. That, the name, the way he slowly raised his hand, and the ball sprang straight into it as if attached to an elastic; the way he ran up on slow tiptoe, the slow leg-break he bowled – they made the man on the bench sit up and watch the game.

AS HE APPROACHED
the school a canal ran alongside the road – the same canal that went through the city he had left far behind. He stopped the car and sat on the bank, looking at the still water, then he lay on his back looking up at the sky. He was twenty-three, which seemed old to him. He was going to his first job. As he drove on he looked at cottages and farmhouses scattered in the fields, thinking that soon he would know the names of the people who lived in them. He couldn’t believe it.

One of his aunts had lent him her car, a duck-egg blue Renault. She said she didn’t want it. She wanted to be free to drink, he knew. He had the anxious innocent face of someone half unaware of what he knew. At the interview he had agreed to teach French and take games – cricket in summer, rugby in winter. He would have agreed to anything to get a job in that musty old school behind high stone walls in the middle of nowhere, where the world could not reach him. The car rattled over a cattle grid, and he drove up the avenue.

Parents and their children were carrying luggage inside. The headmaster wore an academic black gown, his starched white
shirt cuffs flashed as he shook hands and pointed the way. The new teacher went down a dark, flagstoned corridor to a green door. Two young men wearing sports coats and grey trousers like his own turned to look at him as he sidled in. One of them held out his hand and said, ‘George Ingram.’ The other one said, ‘Tom Jacob.’

‘Justin Kelly.’ He echoed their frank voices.

They stood together awkwardly like strangers in a lift until an old man appeared. His name was Charlie Porter, he taught Latin. His smile, ingratiating and menacing, shifted like his false teeth. He asked where they were from, and when they each said Dublin, he asked, ‘What part?’ When Tom hesitated, he smiled again. But then a boy came down the corridor ringing a bell, and they went up to the dining hall where the headmaster introduced them and said grace in a fruity voice. The boys sat down at long tables, form by form. As trays of food were served, the older boys spat on the bigger portions, marking them for themselves. Justin thought that soon he would know their names, but again he couldn’t believe it. There were almost a hundred of them. It was enough for now to know the teachers’ names.

After supper there was Evensong, which as a Catholic he didn’t attend. He went up to his room, unpacked his clothes and set his books on a tall window’s ledge. For as far as he could see there were big empty fields. Hymn-singing and harmonium music still came from the chapel, but he tiptoed as he went downstairs. Everything smelled old. The floorboards creaked, and the heavy door. It was a warm, silent September evening; rooks were settling in the tops of old trees. He walked down the avenue, and looked up and down the narrow road. There was a ruined Norman tower on a hillside and on another a grey church, like old marks almost rubbed away by time. But as a train’s horn sounded and he glimpsed green carriages pulling away across the fields, the cold present
returned. He had found his home smothering; he had gone to live abroad, and broken down. This was where his new life would be. The train’s horn sounded like mockery.

THE PSYCHIATRIST
had given him sleeping pills, which frightened him: they meant he was sick. He hid the small brown plastic bottle under his clothes in the wardrobe and went to bed. As soon as the dormitory lights went out, there was silence as heavy as the air. He didn’t wake until a bell rang next morning and prefects called in accents from every part of the country.

The boys sat sleepy-silent at breakfast, filed into the chapel for morning prayer, ran wild for ten minutes around a high-walled yard, then went into school. Justin’s class was the first form, half a dozen boys sitting in one corner of a huge, shabby room like a parish hall. There were bars on the windows, cattle were bellowing outside. The blackboard was worn grey, its easel shook on the rough plank floor when he wrote the word
Français
. The boys looked at him and whispered to each other. He taught them the French for Yes and No. When he asked them to say the words, they blushed and laughed. Then slowly they began to talk. Five of them came from the same parish. Their national school teacher had been an old woman who had taught them how to knit.

‘Can you all knit?’

‘
Oui, oui
!’

He chalked a sentence on the blackboard and asked them to copy it. Some of them wrote well, some badly, but the sixth boy could hardly write at all. ‘And he can’t knit, sir,’ the other five said.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. The boy looked down at his boots.

‘He doesn’t know that either, sir.’

‘Farr, sir.’ He had a western accent that made the others laugh.

‘Don’t laugh,’ Justin said abruptly. They were together at rock bottom.

SO MANY THINGS
were strange that to manage he had to set his unhappiness aside. Boys ran away, and teachers not in class were sent to bring them back. One morning it was his turn. He drove along the narrow roads, stopping at gates and looking across the wide fields. Farmers looked at him from their combine harvesters, flocks of pigeons rose from tall brown stubble. He found the boy at last, trotting like a stray dog along the grassy verge. When he opened his car door, the boy got in obediently.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Judd, sir.’

‘Are you homesick?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Your parents will visit you.’

Silence.

He learned that some of the boys were orphans, sent to the school by foster parents, whose names they used. The ones the steward called from class to pick potatoes were farmers’ sons. When the post came, a prefect shouted the lucky names and flung letters like food into a hungry crowd. Once a week he was on duty and had to call the entire school roll. The names were so strange to him that he found them easy to remember. After a month he knew them all. When they spoke to him, they said ‘Sir’ in every sentence. They had a shy, obedient manner. They were used to living in their small, enclosed community.

WHEN HE GOT
his first month’s pay, a cheque for £80, the
headmaster
directed him to a bank in the town, where the manager, a small man with a small, red moustache, came from behind the 
counter and shook his hand, opened an account and invited him to join the local golf club. Justin went there on his next half-day, played until he was out of sight of the clubhouse, then lay down in the rough and slept. He had thought that to grow up was simply to go away, and all the strands of home – family, friends,
religion
, school – would turn somehow into a wonderful adult self. Instead the strands had twisted about each other until the twine had snapped, the balloon had drifted away and he had fallen to earth. When he woke, the piercing loneliness and skinless panic of his year abroad were back, like the sleep taste in his mouth. The nodding trees were like giant men. The worst part was the sudden awareness of it, the instinct glimpse that it was not how life need be. The glimpse gone, like the Pole star behind clouds, he returned to the high-walled school.

BUT THERE WAS ALWAYS
something new, strange, to absorb him. When his duty day fell on Sunday, to increase its small congregation, he walked the boys down to the grey church. There was the same locked-up smell as in the school. The farmers wore old
herringbone
suits; their wives wore old-fashioned hats. They stood as the local landowner, a very fat old man, walked slowly up to the front bench and sat down. Then the service began. A gramophone played a scratched record of organ music and the boys sang. Someone gave him a hymnal, and he joined in. The gloom suited him. He was like a mushroom growing in the dark or a weed growing alone.

Everything was nourishment: the lark’s nest of freckled eggs he found in the churchyard when he stepped out during the sermon; the Neolithic knife of white flint he found as he wandered in a vast bog; the loneliness of eating steak and chips in the town on his
half-day
; even the terror of going to the dance hall on Saturday night. ‘Go out and meet people,’ the psychiatrist had said.

George was engaged to be married, so he didn’t go. Justin went with Tom. A showband the size of a football team, dressed as Red Indians, waving tomahawks, filled the stage. As soon as the music began, Tom walked straight across to a girl. Justin watched him dancing and talking seriously, took courage and set off across the floor. He recognized a girl who worked in the school kitchen, but she ran into the toilet when he approached. Desperate, he turned to another girl. As they danced he asked where she came from. She said coolly that it was a mile and a half outside the town, and questioned him. When she heard he was a teacher, she told him she was a nurse in the mental hospital, and when he made a date with her she agreed.

Next Monday evening he waited outside the cinema, but she didn’t appear, and he drove his aunt’s duck-egg blue Renault back to the school. George had made friends already in the local Baptist church, and was at a prayer meeting. Tom was at a teachers’ union meeting. The staff room was empty except for Mr Porter, whose false teeth opened in a smile.’ You weren’t long.’

‘I think I was stood up. Did that ever happen to you?’

‘I’m sure it did.’ As if cheered by another’s failure, Mr Porter talked of his shyness as a young man, of drinking to get courage before a dance. He put a log on the fire and went on talking. One night he had been solicited by a prostitute, he had offered her half a crown, and she had said, ‘That’ll only get you a sniff of my drawers.’ He smiled and looked at Justin until he smiled too. But then, in a voice that made Justin’s skin crawl, he asked suddenly, ‘Do you think you’re better than me?’

‘No. Why would I?’ Justin said, but as he looked at Mr Porter’s white-stubbled chin rippled by red veins, at his cheap suit worn to a black shine, he realized that he did think he was better, and felt horror at the thought of ending up like him.

ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON
the steward drove cattle from a field, the boys put on their togs and played rugby. Most of them didn’t know how, but accepted that it was the game they should play because they were Protestant boys. Justin didn’t know any
Protestant
schools, and so he arranged a match with the school where he had been as a boy. The headmaster frowned but gave permission, and a few weeks later Justin set off to Dublin in the school van. His own old rector looked at the raw-boned boys, their cropped hair, their shorts stained green with cow dung, and he murmured, ‘They don’t exactly smack of the Ascendancy.’ They were the poor descendants of camp followers, used to obeying orders, to being called by their surnames. They wolfed the sliced oranges at halftime, and wallowed in the hot shower cubicles afterwards. They muttered replies to the confident, polite suburban boys, stared at the Jesuits’ long-winged gowns, the crucifixes on the walls. As Justin drove the rattling blue van back to the country, their voices rose and they talked of all they had seen.

‘Well, they were the nicest lads, sir.’

‘Are they monks, sir?’

Even when he turned out their dormitory light they went on talking. Their wonder lit up his own past and he saw it from outside, as a world as small as theirs.

SLOWLY HE FELL
into their routine. On Sunday afternoons they put on their gaberdine coats and caps and lined up for a walk. As he walked the back roads with them he learned their old-fashioned Christian names and heard their stories of home. Farr became Edwin, who talked of a box of apples his grandmother had sent him. Judd became Cedric, who talked of his foster father, an old clergyman. They talked of other clergymen, the food at Harvest Thanksgivings, their sisters, the crops and livestock in the fields.
When he turned out the light in their dormitory, they called, ‘Good night, sir.’

Their loneliness became his own. One night it drove him into town, to the dance hall again, where he met a girl who remained beside him after each set. When he offered to drive her home, she agreed. As soon as they were in his aunt’s car she turned to face him, and they kissed. It was the first time he had kissed a girl and not then been pushed politely away. When he did no more than kiss her, she sat back and talked. She worked in County Clare, she was home only for the weekend. When he left her at her door she said she was returning to Clare the next day. But he sang out loud as he drove back to the school.