R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (2 page)

It was no more than a silhouette at first but Rugeley-Scott, with Celtic obstinacy, persisted until a comprehensive picture emerged. And after that, a train of minor events was fired that involved letters and telephone calls, so that at length, on a still afternoon in early March, seven months after the coal-box had exploded below Pilckhem Wood, David Powlett-Jones found himself sitting on a paint-scarred seat on Dulverton Station, wondering who had dumped a rail junction in such an isolated spot. He wondered too how long he would have to order his thoughts before he boarded a train for a place he had never heard of before Rugeley-Scott gave him the envelope containing particulars for his interview with the Reverend Algernon Herries, Headmaster of Bamfylde School, Devon.

He thought then, with a mixture of bitterness and humility, 'But what the hell am I doing here anyway? What headmaster in his senses would engage a wreck like me, who jumps a foot in the air every time a door bangs? That chap Herries, whoever he is, will take one look at me and show me the door, tut-tutting all the way to the motor, providing they have motors out here.'

He then drew three deep breaths of upland air and despite the memory of the ward's wry jokes about it, found that it did have a noticeable effect upon his powers of concentration. At least it enabled him to evaluate the view of those hanging woods, part evergreen, part the skeletal branches of older, heavier timber, and remark on the astounding quietude of the little station. Quiet was something he had forgotten about, along with so many other things that belonged to his childhood and boyhood. Never once, not even on the blackest night in Flanders, had it been as quiet as this. Always there had been the scrape and shuffle of working parties, the plash of signallers slipping in flooded
trenches, cursing at every traverse. And in the background, always, the guns had growled north or south of the sector, a thunderstorm roaming between Switzerland and the sea.

Here you could almost reach out and touch the quiet. It was a living thing that seemed to catch its breath up there in the hanging woods and then, at a wordless command, slip down the long hillside and gust over the rails to lose itself in the wood opposite. Its touch was gentle and healing, passing over his scar tissue like the fingers of a woman. He wanted to embrace it, press it into himself, swallow it, lose himself in it. And all the time the white clouds overhead kept pace with it, moving in massive formation across the blue band above the valley and the breeze smelled of resin and bracken and all manner of clean, washed, living things. No whiff of putrefaction here. And no hint of gas.

He surrendered to its benediction, and was sound asleep when the walrus-moustached stationmaster found him, studying him with the compassionate detachment of a sixty-year-old who had seen the passage of a thousand troop-trains. The long, slightly saturnine face was Celtic, one of the darker, taller, heavy-browed Celts who had little in common with West Countrymen this side of the Tamar. The limbs, relaxed now, seemed shrunken under the khaki gaberdine, the body pulled in by the worn Sam Browne belt. The face was that of a boy prematurely aged, with hollowed cheeks accentuated by deepset eyes and high cheekbones. The skin was tanned, but below the tan there was a hint of pallor. The railwayman muttered, 'Osspittle. Somewhere up the line,' and was tempted to let him sleep on but then, recollecting his duty, he shook him by the shoulder and said, 'Tiz yer, lad. Vower minutes late. Your stop'll be fourth on, no more'n vifteen minutes.'

The man's clumsy gentleness touched him. It was a long time since anyone had called him 'lad'. It was another short step on the road to resurrection.

2

The flint road wound upward through immense patches of wild rhododendron, then down again to culverts that carried a swirl of storm-water from the moor, along with a sludge of brown, decaying twigs and dead leaves. There had been no one to meet him at the halt and no sign of a conveyance of any kind but he did not mind walking. It set forward the time of the interview by half an hour, the time he calculated it would take him to walk the two miles to the
crossroads marked on the map enclosed with the letter confirming his interview. The crossroads was marked as Barton Cross and when he reached it he saw that the barn or barton marked a junction of four roads that were really no more than half-surfaced cart-tracks. He thought, 'Now who the devil would build a school right out here? Nothing lives here but rabbits,' but then, as at the station, his awakening senses told him the wilderness was teeming with life, every kind of life, and that there was promise here, in a month or two, of an immensity of colour and movement under the touch of April.

Already the hedgerows were starred with campion and primrose, with dog violets showing among the thistles and higher up, where the rhododendrons tailed off on the edge of a little birch wood, the green spires of bluebell were pushing through a sea of rusty bracken.

He calculated the gradient at about one in six and the road kept twisting towards a brown-green summit that was the open moor. And then, coming at last to a level stretch, he saw the grey line of buildings on the southern edge of the plateau, and the twin ribbons of leafless beeches lining the two drives. He paused at a ruined five-bar gate that lacked a hinge and bulged outward. Beyond it was a playing field and on the rugby pitch a game was going on between two fifteens wearing identical red and black jerseys. The cries of the players came to him faintly on the freshening breeze and he had a sense of renewal, seeing the little figures over there not as part of the present but of a time a million years ago, when he had played in the Grammar School fifteen, and had worn a jersey rather like that, save that the stripes were red and yellow. The moment passed and he pushed on, passing up the east drive to the forecourt and pausing in front of the three-storey Gothic building that reared itself there, grey, rather gaunt and incongruous in that setting.

The façade itself was long and flattish but outbuildings straggled all the way up the slight rise to a quadrangle he could glimpse beyond an arched doorway. He remembered then that the place had been built at a period when no commercially minded architect would dream of using any but a Gothic design, a time when the missionaries of Arnold of Rugby swarmed south, carrying the Doctor's creed into every shire of the nation. You did not have to be told it was a school up there. It had, even at this distance, the smell of school, a compound of boiled greens, stale dust, steam-heat, spurned grass, sweat, socks and damp clothes. He moved along the forecourt until he came to an iron-studded door with a knocker fashioned in the shape of a dolphin. He raised the knocker, dropping it without resolution.

The Reverend Algernon Herries looked like an ageing, amiable clown. He had a cheerful, piping voice and a fruity bottle-nose, lined with a network of tiny veins and clothed, as though in crude jest, by a swathe of dark, curling hairs, that reminded David of the legs of an insect. White hair rose from the forehead in a clownish peak, giving a false idea of his stature that was short and thickset but still suggestive of agility and precise movement. His face was an actor's face, that might have been seamed and burnished by years of make up routine. The mobile eyebrows were clownish, too, tufted and pointed like the hair, but below them the eyes were of piercing blueness, the one feature of the face that belonged in a world of earnestness and shrewdness, eyes, David told himself, that would miss little and were there to keep watch over tolerant excesses that could go with a face like that. The man might look eccentric but that did not mean he was anybody's fool. It therefore followed that he would not waste much time on an applicant lacking any kind of degree or experience, who had, moreover, the Twitch.

Yet the handshake was cordial, neither too firm nor too limp, and as he turned to lead the way down a stone corridor to his study he called, 'Mr Powlett-Jones, Ellie! Bring tea, m'dear,' and motioned his visitor into a room spilling over with books and dog-eared papers, indicating the one armchair beside the window, saying, 'Sit you down. Ellie will be here with the tea in a jiffy. My apologies for your having to walk. We had a boneshaker until Christmas but then Stanbury, who drove it, took it into his head to do his bit and join the Army Service Corps. I do hope they don't trust him with one of those heavy Thorneycrofts you chaps use. He'll wreck it, for sure. He was always disputing passage with cromlechs and taking short cuts across patches of bog.'

David began to warm towards him. It was impossible not to, for his geniality was so genuine. But there was rather more to it than that. He was the first civilian David had ever heard inject irony into that phrase 'do his bit'. For years now civilians had talked about 'doing their bit' as though they were on their way to church and wanted everybody to acknowledge their piety.

'I… er… enjoyed the walk sir,' he said, hesitantly. 'The countryside… it's much wilder than the country around Osborne…' but then he stopped, biting his lip. He had been on the point of saying something bloody silly about the tortured Flanders landscape. Herries said, with unexpected gravity, 'How long were you out, Mr Powlett-Jones?'

'Three years.'

'Three? Then you must have been under age when you enlisted.'

'Only a week or two, sir. I went across with a Territorial draft in October. We were untrained but the regulars were badly hammered at First Ypres. I've been luckier than most.'

'There's no possibility of your returning?'

'No, sir, I'm boarded.' And then, with a touch of defiance, 'I'd be no use to anyone out there now.' He noticed dismally, that his hands had begun to shake.

Herries got up suddenly and at first David assumed the movement was an excuse to prevent him noticing the Twitch. It was not. He crossed the room and pointed to a fading sepia photograph hanging above one of the bookshelves. It was a very conventional photograph, fifteen lumpish youngsters, ranged in three rows, one lad squatting and nursing a ball.

'There's no need to feel isolated from us, least of all from me. That was our 1913 First Fifteen. Twelve are dead and one of the survivors is legless. We've lost eighty-seven to date, seventy-two of them known to me personally. My boys.' He was silent a moment. Then, 'On July 8th, 1916, I recorded eight names in one week's casualty list. Does that help?'

It helped but it also embarrassed. Suddenly, inexplicably, David felt his throat constrict and whipped his right hand to his eye. For nearly a minute there was silence in the cluttered room. The bell saved him, saved them both perhaps. Its harsh, clanging note filled the room and then went jangling away to the north as the ringer, relishing his work, crossed the quad towards the longest of the red brick outbuildings. Herries said, 'That's Shawe. Nobody is allowed to touch that bell but Nipper Shawe. He was the smallest boy in the school when he came here, so I had to find something to invest him with dignity. It worked, as you see. He now has the strut of the professional town-crier.'

A murmur reached them, swelling rapidly to a sustained clatter, as boys began to pass the window in twos and threes, boots scuffling, voices shrill and urgent. Herries pushed open the casement and hailed the nearest of them.

'Who won, Daffy?'

A breathless boy paused under the window. 'Nicolson's, sir! Eleven–five.'

'
Eleven
, you say? Great Scott! Outram's were leading five–nil at half-time, weren't they?'

'Yes, sir, but Monkey scored a try early in the second half and Dodger converted. Then Hutchinson scored two more tries far out in the last five minutes!'

'He did? Well, good for Hutch! That must have rattled Outram's. Thank you, Daffy.'

The boy ran on, disappearing in a stream that was flowing through the arch of the western face of the quad. Away in the distance Nipper Shawe was still swinging his handbell. Herries settled himself, reluctantly, David thought, behind his littered desk.

The spate of nicknames, the obvious rapport between headmaster and boys puzzled him. In both his schools the headmaster had been a remote, austere figure. He had never heard either of them use a nickname, or address even a senior boy as a near-equal. His hands stopped shaking. He said, getting some kind of a grip on his nerves, 'I've… er… no degree, sir. I was planning to go up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1914. I only agreed to this interview because the Osborne neurologist insisted. He has… er… some eccentric ideas on therapy.'

'Really? Tell me.'

'He said I could apply for a temporary post, and gain experience while the shortened ex-officers' courses are being arranged at Varsity. I wasn't even sure I wanted to teach. I'm certainly not equipped for the job.'

The tufted eyebrows came up. 'Any other career in mind?'

'No, sir.'

'Then I'd say the neurologist knows what he's about.'

Herries got up again. Behind a desk he seemed unable to express himself with characteristic directness. 'Look,' he said, suddenly, 'why don't you give us a trial? As from now, and irrespective of whether that chap at Osborne is right or wrong? You'd be helping me no end. I'm stuck with a dozen tired men called out of retirement, and two C.3 trainees, rejected by the medicals twice over. Oh, they do what they can, but they come in for a lot of ragging. This overdose of jingoism we've had for so long, it's rubbed off on the boys. You'd have a distinct advantage over the rest of us there. Three years at the Front. Twice wounded. It's a flying start, man.'