Arthur and George (4 page)

“George, how old are you?”

“Twelve, Father.”

“An age at which wisdom and discretion might to a certain degree be expected.”

George does not know if this is a question or not, so he remains silent.

“George, Elizabeth Foster complains that you look at her strangely.”

He is puzzled. Elizabeth Foster is the new maid; she has been there a few months. She wears a maid’s uniform, like all the previous maids.

“What does she mean, Father?”

“What do you think she means?”

George ponders this for a while. “Is it something sinful she means?”

“And if it is, what might it be?”

“My only sin, Father, is that I am hardly aware of her, though I know her to be part of God’s creation. I have not spoken to her more than twice, on occasions when she has mislaid objects. I have no reason to look at her.”

“No reason at all, George?”

“No reason at all, Father.”

“Then I shall tell her she is a foolish and malicious girl who will be dismissed if she gives further grounds for complaint.”

George is eager for his Latin verbs, and does not mind what becomes of Elizabeth Foster. Nor does he wonder if it is a sin not to mind what becomes of her.

Arthur

It was decided that Arthur would study medicine at Edinburgh University. He was responsible and hard-working; in time he would surely acquire the stolidity patients liked to trust. Arthur was agreeable to the idea, if suspicious about its origins. The Mam had first proposed medicine in a letter to Feldkirch, a letter sent within a month of Dr. Waller’s arrival into the household. Mere coincidence? Arthur hoped so; he did not care to imagine his future being discussed between his mother and this interloper. Even if he was, as people constantly reminded him, a qualified doctor and published poet. Even if his uncle was the dedicatee of
Vanity Fair.

It also seemed a little too damned convenient that Waller was now offering to coach him for a scholarship. Arthur accepted with adolescent ill grace, which drew a private word from the Mam. Nowadays he towered over her, and her hair, which had already lost its fairness, was beginning to whiten where it was drawn back behind her ears; but her grey eyes and her quiet voice, and the moral authority implicit in them, remained as powerful as ever.

Waller proved an excellent tutor. Together, they crammed the classics, aiming for the Grierson bursary: £40 a year for two years would be a great help to the household. When the letter came, and the household was united in acclamation, he felt it was his first real achievement, his first act of paying back his mother for her sacrifices over the years. There were handshakes and kisses all round; Lottie and Connie became absurdly sentimental and wept like the girls they were; and Arthur, in a spirit of magnanimity, resolved to lay aside his suspicions of Waller.

A few days later, Arthur called at the University to claim his prize. He was received by a small, embarrassed official whose precise status was never made clear. It was all entirely regrettable. It was still unclear how it had happened. A clerical error of some kind. The Grierson bursary was open only to arts students. Arthur’s entry should never have been accepted. They would take steps in future, and so on.

But there were other prizes and bursaries, Arthur pointed out—a whole list of them. Presumably they would give him one of those instead. Well, yes, that could be the case, in theory; indeed, the next bursary down on the list was available for medicals. Unfortunately, it had already been claimed. As, indeed, had all the others.

“But this is daylight robbery,” Arthur shouted. “Daylight robbery!”

Certainly it was unfortunate. Perhaps something could be done. And the following week it was. Arthur found himself awarded a solatium of £7, which had accumulated in some overlooked fund, and which the authorities graciously felt could be applied to his purpose.

It was his first experience of rank injustice. When he had been beaten with the Tolley, it was rarely without some reasonable cause. When his father was taken away, it had struck a pain to his son’s heart, but he could not protest that his father was blameless; it had been a tragedy though not an injustice. But this—this! He had a case in law against the university, everyone agreed. He would sue them and reclaim the bursary. It took Dr. Waller to persuade him of the inadvisability of suing the institution you were relying upon to educate you. There was nothing to be done except swallow pride and bear disappointment like a man. Arthur accepted this appeal to a manliness he had yet to inhabit. But the calming phrases he pretended to find persuasive were mere breath in his ear. Everything within him festered and burned and stank, like a tiny corner of the Hell he no longer believed in.

George

It is unusual for George’s father to speak to him after prayers have been said and the light turned out. They are supposed to reflect upon the meaning of the words while yielding themselves to the bosom of God’s sleep. In truth, George is more inclined to carry on thinking about the next day’s lessons. He does not believe God will count this a sin.

“George,” his father suddenly says. “Have you noticed anyone loitering near the Vicarage?”

“Today, Father?”

“No, not today. Generally. Recently.”

“No, Father. Why would anyone be loitering?”

“Your mother and I have been receiving anonymous letters.”

“From loiterers?”

“Yes. No. I want you to report anything suspicious to me, George. Somebody pushing something through the door. People standing around.”

“Who are these letters from, Father?”

“They are anonymous, George.” Even in the dark he can sense his father’s impatience. “Anonymous. From the Greek, then the Latin. Without a name.”

“What do they say, Father?”

“They say wicked things. About . . . everyone.”

George knows he is meant to be concerned, but finds it all too exciting. He has been given authority to play the detective, and does so as often as possible without interfering with his school work. He peers from behind the trunks of trees; he obscures himself in the cubbyhole beneath the stairs to watch the front door; he examines the behaviour of those who come to the house; he wonders how he might afford a magnifying glass and, perhaps, a telescope. He discovers nothing.

Nor does he know who starts chalking up sinful words about his parents on Mr. Harriman’s barn and Mr. Aram’s outbuildings. As soon as they are washed off, the words mysteriously reappear. George is not told what they say. One afternoon, taking a circuitous route like all the best detectives, he creeps up on Mr. Harriman’s barn, but all he espies is a wall with some wet patches drying.

“Father,” George whispers after the light has been put out. He assumes this is the permitted time to talk about such matters. “I have an idea. Mr. Bostock.”

“What about Mr. Bostock?”

“He has lots of chalk. He always had lots of chalk.”

“That is true, George. But I think we may safely eliminate Mr. Bostock.”

A few days later George’s mother sprains her wrist and wraps it in muslin. She asks Elizabeth Foster to write the butcher’s list for her; but instead of sending the girl with it to Mr. Greensill, she takes it to George’s father. After comparison with the contents of a locked drawer, Elizabeth Foster is dismissed.

Later, Father has to go and explain things to the magistrates at Cannock. George secretly hopes he might also be asked to give evidence. Father reports that the wretched girl claimed it was all a foolish joke, and has been bound over to keep the peace.

Elizabeth Foster is not seen again in the district and a new maid soon arrives. George feels he could have done better at playing the detective. He also wishes he knew what was chalked on Mr. Harriman’s barn and Mr. Aram’s outbuildings.

Arthur

Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth, instructed in the faith of Rome by Dutch Jesuits, Arthur became English. English history inspired him; English freedoms made him proud; English cricket made him patriotic. And the greatest epoch in English history—with many to choose from—was the fourteenth century: a time when the English archer commanded the field, and when both the French and Scottish kings were held prisoner in London.

But he also never forgot the tales heard while the porridge stick was raised. For Arthur the root of Englishness lay in the long-gone, long-remembered, long-invented world of chivalry. There was no knight more faithful than Sir Kaye, none so brave and amorous as Sir Lancelot, none so virtuous as Sir Galahad. There was no pair of lovers truer than Tristan and Iseult, no wife fairer and more faithless than Guinevere. And of course there was no braver or more noble king than Arthur.

The Christian virtues could be practised by everyone, from the humble to the high-born. But chivalry was the prerogative of the powerful. The knight protected his lady; the strong aided the weak; honour was a living thing for which you should be prepared to die. Sadly, the number of grails and quests available to a newly qualified doctor was fairly limited. In this modern world of Birmingham factories and billycock hats the notion of chivalry often seemed to have declined into one of mere sportsmanship. But Arthur practised the code wherever possible. He was a man of his word; he succoured the poor; he kept his guard against baser emotions; he treated women respectfully; he had long-term plans for the rescue and care of his mother. Given that the fourteenth century had regrettably ended, and that he was not William Douglas, Lord of Liddesdale, the Flower of Chivalry himself, this was the best Arthur could currently manage.

It was the rules of chivalry, and not the textbooks of physiology, which governed his first approaches to the fairer sex. He was handsome enough to attract women, and robustly flirtatious; once, he proudly informed the Mam that he was honourably in love with five women at the same time. It was different from being bosom friends with fellows at school, but at least some of the same rules applied. Thus, if you liked a girl, you gave her a nickname. Elmore Weldon, for instance: a pretty, sturdy thing with whom he flirted furiously for weeks. He called her Elmo, after St. Elmo’s Fire, that miraculous light seen about the masts and yardarms of ships during a storm. He liked to picture himself as a mariner in peril on the seas of life, while she illuminated the dark skies for him. Indeed, he almost became engaged to Elmo; but then, after a while, he didn’t.

He was also much concerned at this time about nocturnal emissions, which had featured little in the
Morte d’Arthur.
Damp morning sheets rather detracted from chivalric dreams; also from a sense of what a man was, or might be, if he put his mind and strength to it. Arthur sought to impose discipline upon his sleeping self by increased physical activity. Already he boxed, and played cricket and football. Now he also took up golf. Where lesser men consulted filth, he read Wisden.

He began to submit stories to the magazines. Once again he was the boy standing on the school desk, deploying his vocal tricks; the cynosure of raised eyes, the cause of mouths dropped open in credulity. He wrote the sort of tales he enjoyed reading—this seemed to him the most sensible approach to the writing game. He set his adventures in distant lands, where buried treasure could often be found, and the local population was high on black-hearted villains and rescuable maidens. Only a certain kind of hero was fitted to take part in the hazardous missions he sketched. For a start, those whose constitutions were enfeebled, those given to self-pity and to alcohol, were manifestly unsuitable. Arthur’s father had failed in his chivalric duty to the Mam; now the task had devolved upon his son. He could not rescue her by fourteenth-century methods, so would have to apply those available in a lesser age. He would write stories: he would rescue her by describing the fictional rescue of others. These descriptions would bring him money, and money would do the rest.

George

It is two weeks before Christmas. George is now sixteen, and no longer feels the excitement of the season as he once did. He knows our Saviour’s birth to be a solemn truth, annually celebrated, but he has left behind the nervous exaltation that still infects Horace and Maud. Nor does he share the trivial hopes his old schoolfellows at Rugeley used openly to express: for frivolous presents of a kind which have no place at the Vicarage. They also annually set their hearts on snow, and would even demean the faith by praying for it.

George has no interest in skating or sledding or the building of snowmen. He has already embarked on his future career. He has left Rugeley and is studying law at Mason College in Birmingham. If he applies himself, and passes the first examination, he will become an articled clerk. After five years of articles, there will be final examinations, and then he will become a solicitor. He sees himself with a desk, a set of bound law books and a suit with a fob chain slung between his waistcoat pockets like golden rope. He imagines himself being respected. He imagines himself with a hat.

It is almost dark when he gets home late on the afternoon of December 12th. As he reaches the front door of the Vicarage he notices an object lying on the step. He bends, then squats to examine it more closely. It is a large key, cold to the touch and heavy in the hand. George does not know what to make of it. The keys to the Vicarage are much smaller; so is that of the schoolroom. The church key is different again; nor does this seem to be a farm key of any kind. But its weight suggests a serious purpose.

He takes it to his father, who is equally puzzled.

“On the step, you say?” Another question to which Father already knows the answer.

“Yes, Father.”

“And you saw no one put it there?”

“No.”

“And did you meet anyone coming away from the Vicarage on your way from the station?”

“No, Father.”

The key is sent with a note to Hednesford police station, and three days later, when George returns from college, Sergeant Upton is sitting in the kitchen. Father is still out on his parish rounds; Mother is hovering anxiously. It crosses George’s mind that there is a reward for finding the key. If this was one of those stories the boys at Rugeley used to love, it would open a strongbox or treasure chest, and the hero would next require a crumpled map with an X marked on it. George has no taste for such adventures, which always strike him as far too unlikely.