The World as I Found It (72 page)

Quiet and snug, with a spiral stair and a heavy trap door that could be thrown down to drown the din of dinner or the bedlam of bedtime, the tower was by far the best thing about that otherwise ugly, sprawling white house. Having grown like an atoll over the years with various ill-conceived additions, the house had no coherence as a home. As a school, however, it was almost perfect, with many large, high-ceilinged rooms that served as classrooms, nurseries and offices. Despite the portrait the press had painted of Beacon Hill as the “Come As You Go School” — feral children and fauvish adults in primitive conditions — the school was quite well appointed, with a tennis lawn and garage, a long shed that served as a laboratory and another strewn with paint, sawdust and plaster of Paris where the children were taught art and carpentry.

Russell and his wife were always giving tours to visiting journalists or the parents of prospective pupils. In her part of the tour, Dora was often at pains to make it known that the children showered twice daily, that their matron was a trained nurse and that “free school” did not mean anarchy, especially with regard to the children's welfare and safety. Russell, picking up where she left off, was wont to talk volubly about the frightening expense of providing lavatories for so many, not to mention the intricacies of boosting the school's heating and electrical capacity and modernizing the kitchen. The hill and the area around it were subject to terrific electrical storms, but here Russell was careful to point out that the children's safety was always of paramount concern, no matter what the cost. As a case in point, the headmaster would direct the visitor to a stump where, several years before, lightning had split a great oak like a stalk of broccoli. And then walking up the hill, he would show his visitors the elaborate network of lightning rods and copper cables he had had attached to the house and outbuildings and to the larger trees. Russell was exceedingly proud of those cables; he liked to shake them, as if to reaffirm his own high prudence and fatherly rectitude, anchored like them into the ground. No, with such cables, he seemed to say, one need not fear lightning.

It surprised and sometimes saddened friends and visitors to think that so vast a mind should be so consumed with such mundane matters. At times, it sorely exasperated Russell himself, who would be hounded into his tower lair, which he had furnished with the rugs he had brought from the Orient and the bust of Voltaire that peered down disdainfully from the file cabinet. From his desk, Russell could see for miles in every direction. To the north, beyond grassy hills patched with whorls of gorse and purplish heather, was a deep, dark wood. East and west were more hills, and to the south, barely visible but understood in the summer disturbances, was a gray slice of sea and the mild green landhead of the Isle of Wight. Yes, the presiding tower gave the headmaster a necessary sense of control over the unruly school and its denizens. Sitting on the windowsill were a pair of powerful binoculars, through which he had spotted several children who had wandered off and had caught many more getting into serious mischief. The headmaster also kept a police whistle handy, blowing one blast to warn the wrongdoer and three blasts in an emergency, as when, a week before, he had seen smoke rising from a shed that a boy had set afire with a filched cigarette.

Looking down now, Russell could see the blackened frame of the shed and the kidney-shaped body of grass where the flames had been racing toward the garage before they were beaten down with wet blankets and the garden hose. Near the shed now, bombing the beetles with little clouds from a pump sprayer, was old Tillham, the caretaker, a crusty old local man and mumbler who did obscure and mostly useless jobs of his own devising. And farther on, by the swings and teeter-totters, Russell could see a flock of children, among them his pride, his John, running higgledy-piggledy with their new teacher, a nubile young Belgian named Lily Loubry. And with the sight of this girl came a certain feeling of disbelief and estrangement that Russell had experienced at various times during his life. Typically, Russell associated it with standing up suddenly. A feeling of faintness, the world suddenly twittering and drained of color and with this a sense of incredible disbelief at what was otherwise a given: that he should be himself, a presence named
Russell
, and that this fast-unraveling skein of sensation should actually be his life — that his life should have slipped to this point. That day on his bicycle in 1902 when he had suddenly realized that he no longer loved his first wife — that had been such an instance. This time, though, the situation was vastly more complicated. It was also much less logical, what with his wife pregnant by another man and his two children hanging in the balance.

Russell and Dora had both wanted brave, fearless children, children hungry for life. And they had gotten them, the children of their dreams. Above all, Russell's fear was that of an orphan, the fear that, with the dissolution of his marriage, his children's easy faith in life might be irreparably broken. Russell knew it didn't take much. At the age of three, the boy, John, had had no fear of heights: he would have run off the chalk bluffs by the sea had Russell not held his hand. Then one day Russell took the boy to the edge and, while trying not to unduly scare him or break his spirit, calmly explained that if he fell from that height, he would break like a plate on the rocks below. The boy knew how a plate broke. Afterward he had a healthy respect for the height and the rocks below. But Russell saw nevertheless how the boy skirted that danger, always pushing and probing it, wondering at that miraculous transformation, from a whole plate to a broken one.

And as he stared down now, Russell couldn't get over it either, that height from his love. In the yard below, the speeding children looked to him like figures in a Brueghel painting. Crowded, rowdy, unmanageable, the scene seemed completely fabulous in perspective. It was that strangeness which strains intelligibility without ever becoming intelligible, hanging there in the way that a sail will crease the outermost rim of the sea, neither approaching nor receding, never resolving the eye's mounting anxiety. Russell was watching the children play — or rather, he was watching the young teacher who was watching the children play. Snap-the-whip, they were playing. The force was too much — they couldn't possibly hold on, nor could he stop it. He might as well have been the man in the moon, for all he could do. Round and round by the crotchety apple tree, the squealing line hurdled down, the children's upturned faces like blank plates when,
snap!
— a hand broke and down they went, tumbling down the dumbles as their teacher gaily clapped, her bobbed hair turned up like a smile as the headmaster thornily peered down, considering.

In truth, Russell's relationship with Dora, shaky as it was, had worsened in that month since the new teacher had come to the school. This was partly Dora's doing. After all, she had agreed to hire the Belgian girl, if only as a kind of guilt offering. Then again, Russell had been doing his best to make his wife feel guilty.

Whatever else, the Belgian girl was startlingly beautiful. Harder for Russell to bear, she seemed maddeningly unconscious of her beauty, filled instead with a sympathetic warmth and enthusiasm that seemed partly a result of her youth and partly a result of spending so much time around children as a maid and nanny. She was dressed carelessly enough that morning she came to be interviewed, bare-legged, in sandals and a simple print dress that buoyed into a high scoop of bosom. Her lips were full and creased in the middle, and her nose had a long Gallic septum made for the ring, refined but not too. Only he noticed that her ears were abnormally large and pointed — inquisitive, he thought, pricked like a doe's ears, alarmed at what he portended. Russell especially liked how, when she thought he was not looking, she would tug at a strand of her straight bobbed hair — how she would suck it, then quickly tuck it behind one large ear, her eyes tilting up, a vague hazel blue.

Certainly she was nervous around him during their interview, but Russell judged that a good sign — a subconscious quickening to him, the wise, gay-spirited headmaster. And really the poor girl was hired before she sat down. He had it all mapped out as he talked to her about the school and England and Brussels. He was exceedingly nice to her, but even then he was queerly aware of feeling resentful toward her, resentful
in advance
, almost knowing even then that she was sure to spurn him eventually. It seemed unfair. Here he was the interviewer and she the interviewee, and yet he felt as if the roles had been reversed, as if he should try to please
her
, a mere girl still wet behind the ears, with none of his worldly attainments. Still, he found it amusing, in a cat-and-mouse way. She seemed to have little idea just who he was, or what sort of school Beacon Hill was, presenting herself quite innocently as a girl who simply adored children and wanted a job teaching. As if that were the whole of it! No, he thought, she was much too casual about her beauty; it was inconceivable a girl could have gone twenty years with such looks without realizing it was a trump to be played. She was being coy, he thought, but he would catch her — and he eyed those earlobes that begged to be nipped and sucked before he worked down her long throat to those plumb breasts that promised to be so magnificent, though he wondered what kind of nipples she had. Fat and pink and protuberant? Or, still delightfully, tiny hard buds on big bells of bosom? Like a girl, she squirmed a bit in her hard chair, and for good reason, he thought — her panties must be sticking to her ample bottom on such a warm day. The sun was streaming in, athwart her. Her upper lip glistened with perspiration. Hesitating at an answer, she ran her tongue around her mouth. She said she had walked there from Petersfield that day — she very much liked to walk in the open air. Faintly, he could smell her, earthy and careless and overheated like wet hay in the sun, her thin white socks drooping over her slender ankles. And oh, those sturdy calves, which touched when her clenched knees touched, a sure sign to him that she was the type to get exceedingly wet very quickly.

She was unused to the chase, he thought, or else she would have been more cautious. She was like one of those trusting Galápagos creatures, knowing no natural predators. Having spent a lot of time around children, she was quite open and free, but where children took her openness at face value, he of course read it much differently. The girl was not stupid in this respect, she was just young. Nor was she completely naive. She had spent the past two years working in England and spoke excellent English. Yet midway through that prolonged interview, Russell vainly insisted upon speaking to her in French, which she said, quite guilelessly, that he spoke well and, when he protested that he did not, nervously added, without the faintest notion of being funny, that she meant he spoke French well for an Englishman.
Hoof, hoof, hoof
. His big, hoarse laugh brought a blush from her, whereupon he hastily apologized and praised her for her candor — charmed.

He liked her even better when he took her into the classroom and saw how good she was with the children, especially with his own children. Dora interviewed her next. Afterward, Dora said she preferred an older, plain-looking woman who was unquestionably better qualified. Yet here Russell reminded her that, as they had both found, the best teacher was not necessarily the one with the best credentials but rather the natural leader who could guide the children while learning right along with them. Dora did concede this point, though more from weariness than conviction. Seeing that he had his heart set on the girl, she simply gave in to him, though not without a parting dig:

So have her, then. I'm sure you know what you like.

As do you, he said snidely, eyeing her big belly. That's
evident
.

Dora's eyes blazed. Never one to miss a blow below the belt, are you!

Yours was the first blow, he said with that bland, smiling self-control that he knew would further infuriate her.

She made a move toward him, at once menacing and looking as if she would fall. She had accused him once of trying to make her so mad that she would miscarry, and he had told her then, with all the treacly malice he could muster, that he dearly wished she would. Dora called him a murderer, and, at that moment, she meant it. Such a knife edge their emotions were on now. Russell in particular had an aristocratic disdain of domestic squabbling and unpleasantry, but lately even he was primed for upset. Dora still loved him. Under the present awkward circumstances, her problem was how to express it. Part of her said that she must fight for him in the traditional feminine way, but this was so foreign to her nature. She was not a woman who lived on her feminine wiles; quite the opposite. Yet even her blunt earthiness — a quality he once had found so refreshing after Ottoline and Colette — worked against her now. Dora saw almost no way to express her conflicting loyalties in a way that he would have found honest or intelligible — her swollen belly gave the lie to anything she might say. Feeling him slipping from her grasp, Dora instead felt increasingly compelled to lash out — to scatter the birds since she could not entice them.

A stout, direct, strong-willed woman of thirty-seven, Dora had stringy, dark gray-streaked hair, which she carelessly sheared herself and braided on either side of her head like Danish twists. She was, at bottom, a kind, motherly woman, with a mythic, hieratic quality that the orphan in Russell was much drawn to, if with a faint edge of fear. Dora, in any case, had none of his cool, murderous reserve. If she could be quick-tempered, she was probably better off for it, being in most cases just as quick to forgive and forget. But now he had pushed her too far. She was a pregnant lioness, and she would not, on any account, be pushed around by him. She scared him — she knew that much — and in her fury that day, she drew close to him and uttered: Hear this, you arrogant son of a bitch. I'm not the only whore in this house, not by a long shot.