R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (14 page)

The party, a little slow at first, was an unqualified success. Once their shyness had worn off the boys opened up to her, as they would to a cheerful elder sister, and he was very amused when Graves-Jones, the most forward of them, gave her a Prussian heel-click when he shook hands and thanked her gravely.

She said, when they had taken themselves off, 'Well, did I strike the right note? I don't want them thinking all of us are as old as God and twice as high and mighty!' and he said, kissing her, 'You were marvellous! I believe that saucy little devil Graves-Jones is hopelessly infatuated. He was looking at you over his last chudley as though you were Mary Pickford in the flesh.'

'Very proper,' she said, 'for it's time someone did something to offset the monastic seclusion of this institution, the poor little beggars don't get a glimpse
of a bit of fluff from the moment they board the train at the nearest junction, until they get back there the first day of the holidays. You can't count Matron, and that nice Mrs Parminter. One's a dragon and the other treats them all as though they were still in the nursery.'

'I'm not sure we should expect them to speculate on bits of fluff at thirteen,' he said, but she replied, sharply for her, 'Why ever not? They're just coming up to the age when the sex taboos are so impossibly complex that they have to be translated into dirty jokes. That's one of the mistakes about places like this. Oh, it's unavoidable, I see that well enough, but if they've got to have fantasies – and all the normal ones always will – then let them be romantic ones. I was madly in love with the All Angels choirmaster at their age.'

'What was he like?'

'Like Lewis Carroll in temperament, but a little more positive. Much given to patting and pinching. He tried hard to get the vicar and churchwardens to include girls in the choir, and even designed fetching little caps for them, but they warned him off, poor little man.'

That was the way of her, from the very first. Unafraid, relaxed, perfectly at ease with the establishment, but never worrying overmuch about saying or doing the wrong thing in a world where, despite all Algy Herries's innovations, tradition still rose about them like a wall patrolled by an older generation suspicious of post-war freedoms and assuming that the Edwardian
status quo
had been restored by the armistice.

She got along very well with Herries, who at once enrolled both Beth and Phyl Irvine in his operatic society, allotting them principal roles in the forthcoming production of
The Mikado
as Yum-Yum and Pitti-Sing respectively. Rehearsals in Big Hall, with Herries himself as Ko-Ko, and old Rapper Gibbs at the piano, gave her an opportunity to mix with the boys from all grades, and she formed very definite conclusions about some of them, but did not necessarily confide her conclusions to him, or not yet.

Secretly she was hard at work sorting them into their various type-categories and the exercise afforded her a good deal of amusement. There was the dashing type, like the young heel-clicking Graves-Jones, and his well-grown prototypes, like Boyer, Dobson and Letherett, now wearing double-breasted lounge suits and narrow collars after moving up to Senior School. None of these were the least shy in her presence, but all treated her with exaggerated courtesy, as if they were rehearsing an approach to the flappers they would partner at dances in a year or so, and embrace if they could prevail on them to step outside.

Then there was the blushing, gawky type, mostly in the Sixth, almost fully adult now but having a hard time of it adjusting to the presence of two pretty girls in their midst, and not in the least sure how to approach them without seeming presumptuous. Bristow, who had followed his dead brother as head prefect and captain of the First Fifteen, was such a one. Invariably he began to stammer when he played Nanky-Poo to her Yum-Yum, so that she had to cast about for a means of putting him at ease and found one by getting him to tell her about his trainee manager's post in a rubber plantation he intended to take on leaving at the end of the summer term. And here and there she came across the arty type, like Archer the Second, who played the violin well, and Blades who, at fifteen, wrote poetry, and the brash beefy extrovert types like Rigby and Bickford, who needed slapping down, she thought, before they grew too big for their boots. There was yet another type that interested her and even puzzled her a little, the boy who walked alone, not as a romantic, like the musician Archer, or the poet Blades, but dourly, as if they were repelled by the gregariousness of school life. Briarley, whom David had told her about, was such a one, and she entirely approved David's efforts to develop the slender bridge between them, begun the day the news came that Briarley's father had been killed in France.

There were one or two others she felt very sorry for and mentioned to David, but tentatively, for it seemed to her easy, in this male world, to jump to facile conclusions. Young Skidmore, the idol-hater, was one of them, for David was right about him, in that he did seem hell-bent on martyrdom. Whatmore was another, whose parents had just been divorced, imposing all the stresses that would bring to a thirteen-year-old. She said, learning that Whatmore was taking it badly, 'I've nothing against divorce if a marriage is intolerable to man and wife but why the hell can't they pretend to rub along until their children are old enough to acquire a little philosophy? I think I would even if I hated the sight of you, Davy!' and as always, when she showed storming indignation over something, she made him laugh.

All kinds of boys. Fat ones, thin ones, handsome ones, homely ones. Boys with plausible excuses, boys with lame ones, boys who never bothered to offer an excuse. Boys who excelled in class but were weeds on the playing field, amiable oaks who were lions on the field and played games inside their heads through four periods in succession. Integrated boys, like Nipper Shawe, the school bell-ringer, high-principled boys like Skidmore. Intelligent extroverts, with a bubbling sense of humour like Boyer, and boys who were having a very
hard time of it, like little Whatmore. One would never have thought it possible to find so many varieties in one school and there were still others waiting to present themselves as term followed term. It was very exhilarating, however, to have so many male eyes on one at church and school concerts, and to have five eighteen-year-olds competing with one another at the Owl Debating Society to bring one cup of watery coffee during an interval in the motion, 'That we support Home Rule for Ireland!' Occasionally she heard something she was not meant to hear but when that happened she was unrepentant. In a world where women were out-numbered a hundred to one, a chance to eavesdrop was a bonus.

The cottage hedge adjoined the long stone wall of Ricketts's Farm, where the boys flocked between the end of afternoon school and high tea to buy hot pasties and apple tarts, baked by old Mrs Ricketts, universally known as Ma Midden, on account of the permanent slush pools in her yard. Towards dusk one October evening Beth was in the roadside corner of the garden, screened by the overgrown hedge, planting a rowan tree in a cleared patch of ground when she heard the cheerful voices of Boyer, Dobson and Letherett approaching the farm gate.

She had not lit the oil-lamps and they must have judged the cottage empty, for Dobson said, 'Old Pow-Wow's a lucky dog and no mistake. His wife isn't the kind of lulu you'd expect to bury herself alive in a dump like this. After all, she's not twenty yet, and with her face and figure she could have married ackers, couldn't she?' She only just stopped herself exclaiming at the implied slight on David overshadowing Dobson's compliment, but curiosity won and she remained bent over her spade as Letherett said, 'Betsy's a corker and no mistake. I'd sooner go to bed with her than you, old sport. But don't get the idea she isn't stuck on him. Anyone could spot that a mile off.' And then, mercifully before they passed out of earshot, she heard Boyer say, 'And why the hell not? Pow-Wow's a damned good sort, and more on top of his job than any of them, bar the Old Man, and Howarth maybe. Jolly good luck to 'em, I say. Tumbler's blonde is easy on the eye, but a bit of a nag, I'd say…' and then Mrs Ricketts's gate clicked and she heard them bawling for Ma Midden, and scampered back to the house to compose herself before Davy got home.

She didn't know quite what to make of that conversation, even though she was already sufficiently familiar with school slang to translate it without much difficulty. 'Ackers' meant money, a Birmingham word that had strayed into the Bamfylde glossary, and Davy's nickname, of course, was acknowledged by
all. 'Corker' signified sex-appeal, and Herries was 'the Old Man' to everyone who did not use 'Algy', whereas Irvine had acquired the soubriquet of 'Tumbler' on account of his bobbing gait. She was a little shocked by the trio's genial contemplation of her as a bedmate, but decided adolescent boys talked the same language as hospital probationers, particularly here, where women were in such short supply. What intrigued her far more, however, was Boyer's championship of Davy, and his emphatic blessing on their marriage. It meant that Boyer at least, and perhaps most of the senior boys, had considered marriage, and her particular marriage, in the abstract and that, she supposed, was evidence that it was regarded as a success. She thought of it as such, of course, and so, she was sure, did Davy, but they were prejudiced. It was something else to have it blessed by a boy of sixteen, and she would have liked to have told Davy about it but knew, instinctively, that this wouldn't do at all. Instead she lit the lamps and gave the Irish stew a vigorous stir as it simmered on the old iron stove. 'A dump' Dobson had called the cottage, but to her it was very far from that. It was a home already, a cosier and more rewarding home than she had ever hoped to possess, notwithstanding Dobson's optimistic assessment of her chances in the marriage market. Dobson was in error anyway. Men of marriageable age were scarce, with a million dead and two million maimed and incapacitated and men of Davy's temperament were scarcer still. She had made up her mind as to that months ago.

He would have been surprised to have learned the real reason prompting her display of demonstrative affection the moment he loomed out of the dusk, and its sequel initiated by her the moment they turned out the lamp and climbed into bed. Up to his job, was he? Well, she was up to hers too, she hoped, and in the moment before she slept she raised his hand to her breast and held it there, thinking, 'Dear God, how lucky I was to lean over that pier-rail that time and fish Davy up from the beach…!' and the random quality of life made her shiver a little, so that she tucked herself into him, as though fearing he might be snatched away and swallowed up with the rest of his generation, with all the boys she had flirted with in the middle years of the war, boys who had been there one day and photographs on their mothers' mantelshelves the next.

2

Her luck was set fair. She was granted her honeymoon wish. By late October
she was so sure that she was carrying his child that a call on Dr Willoughby for confirmation was a formality. She was amused by Davy's fussy concern, however, and even more by his immediate association of pregnancy with her forthcoming appearance in the star role of
The Mikado
.

'Good Lord!' he said, when she told him Willoughby had confirmed her hopes, 'That'll put Algy Herries in a frightful fix! Who can he get to replace you at this stage?' and she said, through her laughter, 'Why should he get anyone? I'll be less than four months on. Do you imagine I'm spending the next six months in a wheel-chair?'

'I wasn't thinking of that, Beth. Just the… well… the look of the thing. I mean, won't you feel damned silly, standing up there singing to an audience of four hundred boys in those circumstances?'

'Not in the least,' she said, 'for I shan't show much. At least, I hope not, and even if I did why should I be embarrassed? Good heavens, Davy, it's not as though the youngest of them doesn't know the facts of life. I'll wager some of them know more than me,' and she remembered the conversation heard through the hedge.

'Well,' he said, doubtfully, 'if you don't care I don't see why I should. Look, do you mind if I tell Ellie? I'm sure she'll be delighted. The great sorrow of her life is that she and the Old Man never had any kids and I'd like her to stand god-mother.'

'Tell whoever you like,' she told him gaily. 'I'm already feeling insufferably smug about it, especially as Phyl Irvine's no-go turned out to be a false alarm.' And then, squeezing his arm, 'We haven't wasted much time, have we?'

'Who would, with you around?' he said, and although he said it as a joke she had a serene impression that he meant it.

As it turned out she was over-optimistic concerning the risks of a public display. In the straight, loose-fitting frocks of the current fashion it didn't show at all but it was a different matter when she came to tie the tight kimono sash of Yum-Yum, in the attic dressing-room she shared with Phyl Irvine at the top of the head's house. Inspecting her, Phyl succumbed to a fit of the giggles.

'I must say you look a very enterprising little maid from a ladies' seminary in that outfit,' but Beth said, 'It's all over the school by now anyway. Things like that are relayed by the jungle drums. I expect poor Driscoe will be more embarrassed than either of us.'

Driscoe, a fourteen-year-old with an excellent treble voice, was the third member of the trio, but if he did notice he didn't give himself away and the
number went off very merrily, as indeed did the whole show, playing three nights to packed houses, that included several carloads of visiting parents. Algy Herries declared that it was the best opera yet, and booked Beth and Phyl a year in advance for
H.M.S. Pinafore
.

The predictability of a place like Bamfylde struck both David and Beth that winter and each of them pondered it in different ways. David saw it as a kind of sheet anchor, something to be prized in a world that he had come to accept, up to the time of his coming here, as disintegrating in volleys of thunder and deadly flashes of lightning, a place where one could be sure of nothing. She saw it, and welcomed it, in a more subdued light, part of a pleasant rhythm that was at one with her new life and the child in her womb. It was a reversion to sanity, where people were born, passed through infancy to childhood and adolescence, and then out into the world beyond Bamfylde to earn their bread. David she saw as a conscientious overseer, poised by the conveyor belt, adding a touch here and there as the products trundled by.