After Such Kindness (18 page)

I’d also been mightily relieved to discover, on meeting the other boys, that they were by no means the beauteous young gods of my anticipation. On the contrary, they were in general rumpled, soiled and greasy individuals who seemed so happy in this state of dirty moistness that they hardly bothered to change their linen, and seemed to comb their hair only once a day before morning prayers when Dr Lloyd made his inspection. I was a paragon of freshness by comparison, and I began to entertain a higher opinion of myself than before.

I also learned, rather more slowly, that in addition to the slovenly nature of their outward appearance, there was much that was low in the inner thoughts of boys, and much that was impure in their conduct. What surprised me most was how little they attempted to hide it. I was horrified to find drawings of unclothed females, crudely labelled, circulating from hand to hand in the dormitories, and even more horrified when the act of procreation was similarly travestied. I averted my eyes when these images passed near my sphere of vision, wondering how the sons of clergymen could have so little regard for the holiness of God’s image in human form. As a result I gained the reputation of a prude, and was mocked accordingly. But, if it prevented me having to look at such sickening pictures, I was happy to be so mocked. Munnings, thinking perhaps that I would bring the matter to Dr Lloyd’s attention, held his penknife hard against my wrist and made me swear never to divulge what I had seen. ‘I do not even wish to think about it,’ I replied. ‘Such things are loathsome to me, as they should be to you.’ But a thing once seen remains in the mind, and sometimes I hated myself for allowing my thoughts to dwell for the briefest moment on what I had glimpsed, and experiencing the old, tormented feelings such glimpses had aroused. I could not imagine how love – pure, innocent, warm and holy love – could descend to such carnal couplings. And yet it had to be so. My father and mother had conceived eight children. We had not arrived on the wings of the wind.

But the best thing about Milburn was undoubtedly Frank Haywood. He was less prone to grossness than the others, and laughter bubbled up in him at every opportunity. He encouraged the lighter side of my nature and we spent all our recreation time making up silly rhymes and even sillier jokes. Naturally our schoolmasters were the butt of most of our juvenilia and each one was given the name of a bird or animal – Dr Lloyd being the stork as I had first imagined him, Mr Molloy (who had long and crooked teeth) a crocodile, Mr Walsh (with wild and wobbling eyes) a lobster, and Mr Melville (slow of pace) a tortoise. We kept pieces of paper in the leaves of our exercise books and created comical verses about them which we passed about under our desks. Frank would always start me off, and I would add the second line. I also shared with Frank the private language I had made up for my family magazine, and we would shout out ‘brillibox!’ if we found a solution to a problem – or ‘stormish!’ if we made an unexpected run at cricket. We found this all highly amusing and the fact that the rest of the school found it highly annoying only encouraged us more.

But, in spite of his readiness to laugh, and in spite of his rotund appearance, Frank was a boy who was prone to the very serious matter of falling in love. One time he mooned for a whole term over Dr Lloyd’s pretty niece who came on a day visit, dressed in blue. And then he became enamoured of the bootboy’s sister, followed by the gardener’s daughter. He often bought little presents for them – a handkerchief, or a bit of ribbon – which is why he was so often ‘skint’. In our second year of friendship he fell in love with the bold, brown girls who sold apples and nuts in the village. He was always talking about them and writing love poems, which I enjoyed lampooning.

‘Isn’t it awful that we’ll both have to wait so long?’ he said one day as we took a walk in the walled garden, attempting to memorize lines from Pliny’s account of the Punic Wars.

‘Wait for what?’ I said, my mind on the tribunes and the senate and the lack of foresight they were showing.

‘Marriage and – you know – all that goes with it.’

‘I hadn’t thought,’ I replied, truthfully. Marriage was something that I had never allowed myself to contemplate. The possibility seemed a hundred years away.

‘Don’t you? I think about it all the time,’ he said gloomily. ‘In fact, I’m afraid I might actually die of love before I have chance to find a wife.’

‘No one dies of love. It’s a p-pathetic fallacy.’

‘I might be the first case
.
I’ll go down in the medical books and my name will live for ever:
Haywood’s Melancholy Disease of the Heart.
They will paint pictures of me on my deathbed!’

‘You’ll survive. Everyone does. And you’ll marry in God’s good time.’ Frank had such an easy-going, loving nature that I was sure that would be the case.

He stopped in his tracks. ‘You’re very cool, I must say. My father was a curate for a dozen years before he got a Living and enough money to marry. That’s twelve years added on to, say, three at Oxford and I’ve still two more here at school. Seventeen years, Jameson! Seventeen years living like a monk! Seventeen years seeing beautiful girls dance about in front of you and knowing you can’t touch them or kiss them or – anything really. And it might be longer!’

‘And it might be shorter too. You have to consider the law of averages.’

‘What’s average, then? How old is
your
father?’ he asked, somewhat belligerently.

‘Fifty-six,’ I said sheepishly.

‘And you are sixteen. So he was almost forty when he married. I can’t imagine waiting until I’m
forty
to do the deed. It’s bad enough
thinking
about it.’

I’d always avoided thinking about it. ‘Things will happen when they will. There’s no p-point in tormenting oneself. Now let me get on with P-Pliny.’

‘Pliny?
Pliny?
I give up on you sometimes, John.’ Then his voice took on a teasing note. ‘I don’t think you’ve even
tried
to kiss a girl, have you?’

‘Well, have
you
?’ I retorted, recalling that his passions had so far been unrequited.

‘Yes, I have.’ He looked at me triumphantly. ‘I kissed my cousin, Jane Freeman, last Christmas during hide-and-seek. She had very soft, cushiony sort of lips. She was cushiony everywhere, in fact. I thought about her all the holiday.’ He adopted the dreamy look I knew so well.

‘Well,’ I said, emboldened. ‘I kiss my sisters all the time. And there are seven of them.’

‘Oh, sisters don’t count.’

‘And cousins do?’

‘Of course. You can marry your cousin, but not your sister.’

It occurred to me that if kissing my sisters was delightful, perhaps kissing a cousin – or a sweetheart – would be even better. Of course, I had not yet met anyone outside my family whom I wished to kiss. Perhaps I was simply very choosy. Perhaps, like my father and Frank’s father and many hundreds of others, I simply had to wait for God’s good time.

He lowered his voice. ‘What do you think of Gypsy Susan, for example?’

This was a name he had given one of the nut-brown girls. She was not a gypsy at all, but it suited Frank to romanticize her a little. ‘I think she’s rather dirty,’ I said.

‘But beautiful, don’t you think?’

I’d never really looked at her. To tell the truth, I’d never dared to. I’d just been aware of her bold eyes making me drop my gaze to her filthy, unshod feet. ‘I don’t know. Nice enough, I daresay. To other gypsies.’

Frank put his face close to mine. ‘I dare you to kiss her.’

‘Dare not accepted. And if we don’t get this speech of Scipio Africanus translated in half an hour, we’ll be in trouble with the Croc.’

‘You’re too scared to do it!’ He did a little dance of joy.

‘Not at all. It’s just not polite to go around kissing young ladies without asking them.’

‘But supposing you did ask, and she said yes?’

‘Too many hypotheticals.’ And I closed my mind to the topic and went back to my Latin.

But Frank was not a boy to be thwarted. Our next half-holiday, we went walking down towards the river. I could tell he was on the lookout for Gypsy Susan, living as she did in one of the hovels where the people burned sticks for charcoal and did a bit of fishing. There were always old women sitting on broken chairs outside their doorways, waiting for the children to bring back what they had scavenged. The old women nodded at us as they puffed away at their clay pipes, and the children rushed up holding out their muddy hands in begging welcome, but Gypsy Susan was nowhere to be seen. I was greatly relieved. But as we headed back along the woodland path, suddenly there she was, standing in a patch of dry earth under a chestnut tree, kicking a small stone about with her bare feet. I attempted to keep walking, head down, but Frank pulled me by the arm. ‘Here’s your chance!’

‘No!’ I said, wresting my arm away. She went on playing with the stone, ignoring us grandly. She was wearing some sort of dark red skirt, short enough to show her calves.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ Frank said smoothly, pulling off his hat.

She went on kicking the stone, then sent it skidding into the undergrowth with one deft movement. I watched her graceful limbs and the toss of her black hair as if in a trance. ‘Leave her alone, Frank,’ I said, my voice choked.

‘Would you like to earn sixpence?’ he said to her then. His words were like a shard of glass through my heart as I anticipated his strategy.

She looked up warily. ‘Wha’ fer?’ she said. Her voice was rough and cracked.

‘For being so pretty.’

She laughed. She had bad teeth behind the rosy lips. ‘An’ whar’ else?’ She stood firm, legs set apart, eyes narrowed.

‘Just a kiss. We’ve walked all the way hoping to see you. It’s two miles, you know, from the school. Two miles for a kiss. Thruppence each one. Is that a bargain?’ He gave her his most winning smile.

‘Let’s see yer monay, furst.’ Her speech had a strong local burr.

Frank drew out a sixpenny piece from his waistcoat pocket. She looked at it hungrily. ‘Just two kisses, mind?’ she said. Then, looking at me, ‘Your friend doan’t seem too keen.’

I was stunned. ‘You can’t p-pay her, Frank!’ I said. ‘That’s wrong!’

‘No it ain’t,’ she said, turning on me. ‘You don’t need to poake yer nose in, beanpole.’

‘Well, I’m having nothing to do with it.’ I walked away, shocked at Frank’s behaviour, my head reeling from the look of her taunting eyes, her maddeningly graceful limbs. Once out of sight I leaned up against a tree, my blood racing. All was quiet. Seconds later, Frank appeared, looking rather white and shaken. I thought perhaps she had stolen his money without completing the bargain. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ I whispered. ‘P-Paying her – it’s making her a harlot. Kisses should be given freely.’

‘She kissed in a very funny way.’ He licked his lips, doubtingly.

Before I’d had time to ask him what he meant, she came prancing back along the path, her dark mass of hair swinging back and forth. She stopped when she saw us both looking so nonplussed. Then, before I had time to avoid her, she pushed me back against the tree trunk. Her hands were hard, her whole body was hard: bone and sinew rather than soft flesh. I smelled her overpowering sweat, felt her lips up against me, salty and dirty. I closed my eyes, half of me yielding, half resisting. Then I felt her tongue, lithe like a serpent. To my amazement, she tried to push it into my mouth. I gagged and thrust her away in horror. The she laughed again and let me go, and walked off. ‘There y’are, lads – two fer a tanner,’ she called out over her shoulder. ‘I doan’t cheat.’

I spat on the floor, trying to rid myself of her sour smell and fishy taste. I rubbed my mouth and my nose and my cheeks with my handkerchief. I felt I wanted to wash myself, cleanse myself, douse myself for ever in the stream of Living Water, purify myself of this horrid deed.

Frank seemed amused at my antics. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Anyone would think you’d swallowed a frog.’

‘I feel I have.’ I couldn’t help shuddering. ‘Ugh, ugh, ugh!’

‘Her mouth was a bit wet,’ he said. ‘Not at all like Jane Freeman’s. But still.’ He smiled. ‘It was well worth thruppence.’

I looked at him aghast. ‘So you enjoyed it?’

He looked at me. ‘Yes, of course I did. And she has her sixpence. You’re the only one making a fuss.’

I could not tell him how loathsome I thought him, how I felt betrayed by him, how immoral the whole procedure had been. I could not understand how any decent person could indulge in such grossness, and I determined I would never again put myself in such a position. Kissing, for me, would always be confined to my mother and sisters. Let Frank look forward to the marriage bed; I had no such ambitions.

And I have not changed my mind. Even Daniel’s blissful marriage does not tempt me. Even the prospect of begetting children of my own does not shake my resolve. It seems to me that I am supremely suited to be an uncle and a friend; to share a particular part of my life with others, but no more. I should, for example, utterly dislike to give up my life as a scholar, in which I have no one to be responsible for, save myself (and Dinah, of course). When you really love the subject which is your livelihood, no effort is too much. But I would hate to have dealings with a wife, as Daniel does, on the subject of What Shall We Have for Dinner? or Should the Cook be Given Notice? Or Can We Afford a Carriage? It is much more pleasant to know nothing of domestic matters except that I will find a four-course meal waiting for me at seven o’clock each evening, of which I may eat as little or as much as I please, and converse with my curmudgeonly fellow dons in like degrees. I may drink a little brandy without censure, and I may retire to bed as early as suits me. I may wake in the night and thrash around in the bedclothes without disturbance to a living soul except myself. If I have a mind to attend to algebraic geometry at two in the morning, I can do it. This is selfish, I own it. Whereas, in most people’s minds, there is a sofa marked ‘Kindness’ to welcome all comers, in mine there is but one chair, marked ‘Selfishness’, and other people can’t come into it to bother me, because there is nowhere for them to sit. And where most people have a little stool called ‘Humility’, in mine there is a great one called ‘Conceit’, and it is so high that, were you to sit on it, your head would knock hard against the ceiling. Fellows like Smith-Jephcott like to think that is all I am about; that work and self-importance are what I am entirely made of. He is wrong. I have a heart, of course, ticking away like a pocket watch. But I am only tempted to open my heart to children.