Eyeless In Gaza (22 page)

J.B.'

‘It's too sickening!' said Anthony, when he had finished reading his father's letter. The tears came into his eyes; he was filled with a sense of intolerable grievance.

‘W-what does he s-say?' Brian asked.

‘It's all settled. He's written to your Mater that we're going to some stinking hole in Switzerland instead of Tenby. Oh, I really am too sick about it!' He crumpled up the letter and threw it angrily on the ground, then turned away and tried to relieve his feelings by kicking his play-box. ‘Too sick, too sick!' he kept repeating.

Brian was sick too. They were going to have had such a splendid time at Tenby; it had all been imaginatively foreseen, preconstructed in the most luxuriant detail; and now, crash! the future good time was in bits.

‘S-still,' he said at last, after a long silence, ‘I exp-pect you'll enj-joy yourself in S-switzerland.' And, moved by a sudden impulse, for which he would have found it difficult to offer an explanation, he picked up Mr Beavis's letter, smoothed out the crumpled pages and handed it back to Anthony. ‘Here's your l-letter,' he said.

Anthony looked at it for a moment, opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again, and taking the letter, put it away in his pocket.

The congenial company in which they were to explore the Bernese Oberland turned out, when they reached Rosenlaui, to consist of Miss Gannett and her old school-friend Miss Louie Piper. Mr Beavis always spoke of them as ‘the girls,' or else, with a touch of that mock-heroic philological jocularity to which he was so partial, ‘the damsels' –
dominicellae
, double diminutive of
domina.
The teeny weeny ladies! He smiled to himself each time he pronounced the word. To Anthony the damsels seemed a pair of tiresome and already elderly females. Piper, the thin one, was like a governess. He preferred fat old Gannett, in spite of that awful mooey, squealing laugh of hers, in spite of the way she puffed and sweated up the hills. Gannett at least was well-meaning. Luckily, there were two other English boys in the hotel. True, they came from Manchester and spoke rather funnily, but they were decent chaps, and they knew an extraordinary number of dirty stories. Moreover, in the woods behind the hotel they had discovered a cave, where they kept cigarettes. Proudly, when he got back to Bulstrode, Anthony announced that he had smoked every day of the hols.

One Saturday in November Mr Beavis came down to Bulstrode for the afternoon. They watched the football for a bit, then went for a depressing walk that ended, however, at the King's Arms. Mr Beavis ordered crumpets ‘and buttered eggs for this young stalwart' (with a conspiratorial twinkle at the waitress, as though she also knew that the word meant ‘foundation-worthy'), ‘and cherry jam to follow – isn't cherry the favourite?'

Anthony nodded. Cherry
was
the favourite. But so much solicitude made him feel rather suspicious. What could it all be for? Was he going to say something about his work? About going in for the scholarship next summer? About . . .? He blushed. But after all, his father couldn't possibly know anything about
that.
Not possibly. In the end he gave it up; he couldn't imagine what it was.

But when, after an unusually long silence, his father leaned forward and said, ‘I've got an interesting piece of news for you, dear boy,' Anthony knew, in a sudden flash of illumination, exactly what was coming.

‘He's going to marry the Gannett female,' he said to himself.

And so he was. In the middle of December.

‘A companion for you,' Mr Beavis was saying. That youthfulness, those fresh and girlish high spirits! ‘A companion as well as a second mother.'

Anthony nodded. But ‘companion' – what did he mean? He thought of the fat old Gannett, toiling up the slopes behind Rosenlaui, red-faced, smelling of sweat, reeking . . . And suddenly his mother's voice was sounding in his ears.

‘Pauline wants you to call her by her Christian name,' Mr Beavis went on. ‘It'll be . . . well, jollier, don't you think?'

Anthony said ‘Yes,' because there was obviously nothing else for him to say, and helped himself to more cherry jam.

‘Third person singular aorist of
?' questioned Anthony.

Horse-Face got it wrong. It was Staithes who answered correctly.

‘Second plural pluperfect of
?'

Brian's hesitation was due to something graver than his stammer.

‘You're putrid tonight, Horse-Face,' said Anthony and pointed his finger at Staithes, who gave him the right answer again. ‘Good for you, Staithes.' And repeating Jimbug's stalest joke, ‘The sediment sinks to the bottom, Horse-Face,' he rumbled in a parody of Jimbug's deep voice.

‘Poor old Horse-Face!' said Staithes, slapping the other on the back. Now that Horse-Face had given him the pleasure of knowing less Greek grammar than he did, Staithes almost loved him.

It was nearly eleven, long after lights-out, and the three of
them were crowded into the w.c., Anthony in his capacity of examiner sitting majestically on the seat, and the other two squatting on their heels below him, on the floor. The May night was still and warm; in less than six weeks they would be sitting for their scholarship examinations, Brian and Anthony at Eton, Mark Staithes at Rugby. It was after the previous Christmas holidays that Staithes had come back to Bulstrode with the announcement that he was going in for a scholarship. Astonishing news and, for his courtiers and followers, appalling! That work was idiotic, and that those who worked were contemptible, had been axiomatic among them. And now here was Staithes going in for a schol with the other swots – with Benger Beavis, with old Horse-Face, with that horrible little tick, Goggler Ledwidge. It had seemed a betrayal of all that was most sacred.

By his words first of all, and afterwards, more effectively, by his actions, Staithes had reassured them. The scholarship idea was his Pater's. Not because of the money, he had hastened to add. His Pater didn't care a damn about the money. But for the honour and glory, because it was a tradition in the Family. His Pater himself and his Uncles, his Fraters – they had all got schols. It wouldn't do to let the Family down. Which didn't change the fact that swotting was a stinking bore and that all swotters who swotted because they liked it, as Horse-Face and Beavis seemed to do, or for the sake of the money, like the miserable Goggler, were absolute worms. And to prove it he had ragged old Horse-Face about his stammer and his piddle-warblers, he had organized a campaign against Goggler for funking at football, he had stuck nibs into Beavis's bottom during prep; and, though working very hard himself, he had made up for it by playing harder than ever and by missing no opportunity of telling everyone how beastly swotting was, how he had absolutely no chance whatever of getting a schol.

When face had been sufficiently saved, he had changed his tactics towards Beavis and Horse-Face, and after showing himself for some time progressively more friendly towards them, had ended by proposing the creation of a society of mutual assistance in schol swotting. It was he who, at the beginning of the summer term, had suggested the nightly sessions in the w.c. Brian had wanted to include Goggler in these reading-parties; but the other two had protested; and anyhow, the w.c. was demonstrably too small to contain a fourth. He had to be content with helping Goggler in occasional half-hours during the day. Night and the lavatory were reserved for the triumvirate.

To explain this evening's failure with Greek verbs, ‘I'm rather t-t-t . . .' Brian began; then, forced into apparent affectation, ‘rather weary to-n-night,' he concluded.

His pallor and the blue transparency under his eyes testified to the truth of his words; but for Mark Staithes they were obviously an excuse by means of which Horse-Face hoped to diminish a little the sting of his defeat at the hands of one who had been swotting, not for years, as his rivals had, but only a few months. It was an implied confession of inferiority. Triumphing, Staithes felt that he could be magnanimous. ‘Hard luck!' he said solicitously. ‘Let's have a bit of a rest.'

From the pocket of his dressing-gown Anthony produced three ginger-nuts, rather soft, it was true, with age, but none the less welcome.

For the thousandth time since it had been decided that he should go in for a scholarship, ‘I wish I had the ghost of a chance,' said Staithes.

‘You've g-got a very g-good one.'

‘No, I haven't. It's just a crazy idea of my Pater's. Crazy!' he repeated, shaking his head. But in fact it was with a tingling, warm sensation of pride, of exultation, that he remembered his father's words. ‘We Staitheses . . . When
one's a Staithes . . . You've got as good brains as the rest of us, and as much determination . . .' He forced a sigh, and, aloud, ‘Not a ghost of a chance,' he insisted.

‘Yes, you h-have, honestly.'

‘Rot!' He refused to admit even the possibility of the thing. Then, if he failed, he could laughingly say, ‘I told you so'; and if he succeeded, as he privately believed he would, the glory would be all the greater. Besides, the more persistently he denied his chances, the oftener they would repeat their delicious assurances of his possible, his probable, success. Success, what was more, in their own line; success, in spite of his consistent refusal, till the beginning of last term, ever to take this ridiculous swotting seriously.

It was Benger who brought the next tribute. ‘Jimbug thinks you've got a chance,' he said. ‘I heard him talking to old Jacko about it yesterday.'

‘What does that old fool Jimbug know about it?' Staithes made a disparaging grimace; but through the mask of contempt his brown eyes shone with pleasure. ‘And as for Jacko . . .'

A sudden rattling of the door-handle made them all start. ‘I say, you chaps,' came an imploring whisper through the keyhole, ‘do buck up! I've got the most frightful bellyache.'

Brian rose hastily from the floor. ‘We must l-let him in,' he began.

But Staithes pulled him down again. ‘Don't be a fool!' he said; then, turning towards the door, ‘Go to one of the rears downstairs,' he said, ‘we're busy.'

‘But I'm in a most frightful hurry.'

‘Then the quicker you go, the better.'

‘You are swine!' protested the whisper. Then ‘Christ!' it added, and they heard the sound of slippered feet receding in a panic rush down the stairs.

Staithes grinned. ‘That'll teach him,' he said. ‘What about another go at the Greek grammar?'

Outraged in advance, James Beavis had felt his indignation growing with every minute he spent under his brother's roof. The house positively reeked of matrimony. It was asphyxiating! And there sat John, fairly basking in those invisible radiations of dark female warmth, inhaling the stuffiness with a quivering nostril, deeply contented, revoltingly happy! Like a marmot, it suddenly occurred to James Beavis, a marmot with its female, crowded fur to fur in their subterranean burrow. Yes, the house was just a burrow – a burrow, with John like a thin marmot at one end of the table and that soft, bulging marmot-woman at the other, and between them, one on either side, himself, outraged and nauseated, and that unhappy little Anthony, like a changeling from the world of fresh air, caught and dragged down and imprisoned in the marmot-warren. Indignation begot equally violent pity and affection for this unhappy child, begot at the same time a retrospective feeling of sympathy for poor Maisie. In her lifetime he had always regarded Maisie as just a fool – hopelessly silly and frivolous. Now, John's marriage and the oppressive connubiality which enveloped the all too happy couple made him forget his judgments on the living Maisie and think of her as a most superior woman (at least, she had had the grace to be slim), posthumously martyred by her husband for the sake of this repulsively fleshy female marmot. Horrible! He did well to be angry.

Pauline meanwhile had refused a second helping of the chocolate soufflé.