Eyeless In Gaza (8 page)

The end of the afternoon was still smokily bright above the house tops. And, all at once, here was the river, shining, with the black barges, and a tug, and St Paul's like a balloon in the sky, and the mysterious Shot Tower.

On the bridge, a man was throwing bread to the seagulls. Dim, almost invisible, they came sliding through the air; turned, with a tilt of grey wings, leaning against their speed, and suddenly flashed into brilliance, like snow against the dark fringes of the sky; then wheeled away again out of the light, towards invisibility. Anthony looked and stopped humming. Swerving towards you on the ice, a skater will lean like that.

And suddenly, as though, disquietingly, he too had understood the inner significance of those swooping birds, ‘Dear boy,' Mr Beavis began, breaking a long silence. He pressed Anthony's arm. ‘Dear boy!'

With a sinking of the heart Anthony waited for what he would say next.

‘We must stand together now,' said Mr Beavis.

The boy made a vague noise of acquiescence.

‘Close together. Because we both . . .' he hesitated, ‘we both loved her.'

There was another silence. ‘Oh, if only he'd stop!' Anthony prayed. Vainly. His father went on.

‘We'll always be true to her,' he said. ‘Never . . . never let her down? – will we?'

Anthony nodded.

‘Never!' John Beavis repeated emphatically. ‘Never!' And to himself he recited yet once more those lines that had haunted him all these days:

Then aloud and in a tone almost of defiance, ‘She'll never be dead for us,' he said. ‘We'll keep her living in our hearts – won't we?'

‘Living for us,' his father continued, ‘so that we can live for her – live finely, nobly, as she would want us to live.' He paused on the brink of a colloquialism – the sort of colloquialism, he intended it to be, that a schoolboy would understand and appreciate. ‘Live . . . well, like a pair of regular “bricks,”' he brought out unnaturally. ‘And bricks,' he continued, extemporizing an improvement on the original locution, ‘bricks that are also “pals.” Real “chums.” We're going to be “chums” now, Anthony, aren't we?'

Anthony nodded again. He was in an agony of shame and embarrassment. ‘Chums.' It was a school-story word.
The Fifth Form at St Dominic's
. You laughed when you read it, you howled derisively.
Chums!
And with his father! He felt himself blushing. Looking out of the side window, to hide his discomfort, he saw one of the grey birds come swooping down, out of the sky, towards the bridge; nearer, nearer; then
it leaned, it swerved away to the left, gleamed for a moment, transfigured, and was gone.

At school everyone was frightfully decent. Too decent, indeed. The boys were so tactfully anxious not to intrude on his emotional privacy, not to insult him with the display of their own high spirits, that, after having made a few constrained and unnatural demonstrations of friendliness, they left him alone. It was almost, Anthony found, like being sent to Coventry. They could hardly have made it worse for him if he had been caught stealing or sneaking. Never, since the first days of his first term, had he felt so hopelessly out of it all as he felt that evening.

‘Pity you missed the match this afternoon,' said Thompson as they sat down to supper; he spoke in the tone he would have used to a visiting uncle.

‘Was it a good game?' Anthony asked with the same unnatural politeness.

‘Oh, jolly good. They won, though. Three-two.' The conversation languished. Uncomfortably, Thompson wondered what he should say next. That limerick of Butterworth's, about the young lady of Ealing? No, he couldn't possibly repeat that; not today, when Beavis's mother . . . Then what? A loud diversion at the other end of the table providentially solved his problem. He had an excuse to turn away. ‘What's that?' he shouted with unnecessary eagerness. ‘What's that?' Soon they were all talking and laughing together. From beyond an invisible gulf Anthony listened and looked on.

‘Agnes!' someone called to the maid. ‘Agnes!'

‘Aganeezer Lemon-squeezer,' said Mark Staithes – but in a low voice, so that she shouldn't hear; rudeness to the servants was a criminal offence at Bulstrode, and for that reason all the more appreciated, even
sotto voce.
That lemon-squeezer
produced an explosion of laughter. Staithes himself, however, preserved his gravity. To sit unsmiling in the midst of the laughter he himself had provoked gave him an extraordinary sense of power and superiority. Besides, it was in the family tradition. No Staithes ever smiled at his own joke or epigram or repartee.

Looking round the table, Mark Staithes saw that the wretched, baby-face Benger Beavis wasn't laughing with the rest, and for a second was filled with a passionate resentment against this person who had dared not to be amused by his joke. What made the insult more intolerable was the fact that Benger was so utterly insignificant. Bad at football, not much use at cricket. The only thing he was good at was work. Work! And did such a creature dare to sit unsmiling when he . . . Then, all of a sudden, he remembered that the poor chap had lost his mother, and, relaxing the hardness of his face, he gave him, across the intervening space, a little smile of recognition and sympathy. Anthony smiled back, then looked away, blushing with an obscure discomfort as though he had been caught doing something wrong. The consciousness of his own magnanimity and the spectacle of Benger's embarrassment restored Staithes to his good humour.

‘Agnes!' he shouted. ‘Agnes!'

Large, chronically angry, Agnes came at last.

‘More jam, please, Agnes.'

‘Jore mam,' cried Thompson. Everybody laughed again, not because the joke was anything but putrid, but simply because everybody wanted to laugh.

‘And breadney.'

‘Yes, more breaf.'

‘More breaf, please, Agnes.'

‘Breaf, indeed!' said Agnes indignantly, as she picked up the empty bread-and-butter plate. ‘Why can't you say what you mean?'

There was a redoubling of the laughter. They couldn't say what they meant – absolutely couldn't, because to say ‘breaf' or ‘breadney' instead of bread was a Bulstrodian tradition and the symbol of their togetherness, the seal of their superiority to all the rest of the uninitiated world.

‘More Pepin le Bref!' shouted Staithes.

‘Pepin le Breadney, le Breadney!'

The laughter became almost hysterical. They all remembered the occasion last term, when they had come to Pepin le Bref in their European History. Pepin le Bref – le
Bref!
First Butterworth had broken down, then Pembroke-Jones, then Thompson – and finally the whole of Division II, Staithes with the rest of them, uncontrollably. Old Jimbug had got into the most appalling bait. Which made it, now, even funnier.

‘Just a lot of silly babies!' said Agnes; and, finding them still laughing when, a moment later, she came back with more bread. ‘Just babies!' she repeated in a determined effort to be insulting. But her stroke did not touch them. They were beyond her, rapt away in the ecstasy of causeless laughter.

Anthony would have liked to laugh with them, but somehow did not dare to do more than smile, distantly and politely, like someone in a foreign country, who does not understand the joke, but wants to show he has no objection to other people having a big of fun. And a moment later, feeling hungry, he found himself unexpectedly struck dumb above his empty plate. For to have asked for more breaf, or another chunk of breadney, would have been, for the sacred pariah he had now become, at once an indecency and an intrusion – an indecency, because a person who has been sanctified by his mother's death should obviously not talk slang, and an intrusion, because an outsider has no right to use the special language reserved to the elect. Uncertainly, he hesitated. Then at last, ‘Pass me the bread, please,' he
murmured; and blushed (the words sounded so horribly stupid and unnatural) to the roots of his hair.

Leaning towards his neighbour on the other side, Thompson went on with his whispered recitation of the limerick. ‘. . . all over the ceiling,' he concluded; and they shrieked with laughter.

Thank goodness, Thompson hadn't heard. Anthony felt profoundly relieved. In spite of his hunger, he did not ask again.

There was a stir at the high table; old Jimbug rose to his feet. A hideous noise of chair-legs scraping across boards filled the hall, solidly, it seemed; then evaporated into the emptiness of complete silence. ‘For all that we have received . . .' The talk broke out again, the boys stampeded towards the door.

In the corridor, Anthony felt a hand on his arm. ‘Hullo, B-benger.'

‘Hullo, Foxe.' He did not say, ‘Hullo, Horse-Face,' because of what had happened this morning. Horse-Face would be as inappropriate to the present circumstances as Breaf.

‘I've got s-something to sh-show you,' said Brian Foxe, and his melancholy, rather ugly face seemed suddenly to shine, as he smiled at Anthony. People laughed at Foxe because he stammered and looked like a horse. But almost everybody liked him. Even though he was a bit of a swot and not much good at games. He was rather pi, too, about smut; and he never seemed to get into trouble with the masters. But in spite of it all, you had to like him, because he was so awfully decent. Too decent, even; for it really wasn't right to treat New Bugs the way he did – as though they were equals. Beastly little ticks of nine the equals of boys of eleven and twelve; imagine! No, Foxe was wrong about the New Bugs; of that there could be no doubt. All the same, people liked old Horse-Face.

‘What have you got?' asked Anthony; and he felt so grateful to Horse-Face for behaving towards him in a normal, natural way, that he spoke quite gruffly, for fear the other might notice what he was feeling.

‘Come and see,' Brian meant to say; but he got no further than ‘C-c-c-c . . .' The long agony of clicks prolonged itself. At another time, Anthony might have laughed, might have shouted, ‘Listen to old Horse-Face trying to be sea-sick!' But today he said nothing; only thought what awful bad luck it was on the poor chap. In the end, Brian Foxe gave up the attempt to say, ‘Come and see,' and, instead, brought out, ‘It's in my p-play-box.'

They ran down the stairs to the dark lobby where the play-boxes were kept.

‘Th-there!' said Brian, lifting the lid of his box.

Anthony looked, and at the sight of that elegant little ship, three-masted, square-rigged with paper sails, ‘I say,' he exclaimed, ‘that's a beauty! Did you make her yourself?'

Brian nodded. He had had the carpenter's shop to himself that afternoon – all the tools he needed. That was why she was so professional-looking. He would have liked to explain it all, to share his pleasure in the achievement with Anthony; but he knew his stammer too well. The pleasure would evaporate while he was laboriously trying to express it. Besides, ‘carpenter' was a terrible word. ‘We'll t-try her to-n-night,' he had to be content with saying. But the smile which accompanied the words seemed at once to apologize for their inadequacy and to make up for it. Anthony smiled back. They understood one another.

Carefully, tenderly, Brian unstepped the three matchstick masts and slipped them, sails and all, into the inner pocket of his jacket; the hull went into his breeches. A bell rang. It was bed-time. Obediently, Brian shut his play-box. They started to climb the stairs once more.

‘I w-won f-five more g-games today with my old c-c-c . . . my ch-cheeser,' he emended, finding ‘conker' too difficult.

‘Five!' cried Anthony. ‘Good for the old Horse-Face!'

Forgetting that he was an outcast, a sacred pariah, he laughed aloud. He felt warm and at home. It was only when he was undressing in his cubicle that he remembered – because of the tooth powder.

‘Twice a day,' he heard her saying, as he dipped his wet brush into the pink carbolic-smelling dust. ‘And if you possibly can, after lunch as well. Because of the germs.'

‘But Mother, you can't expect me to go up and clean them after
lunch
!'

The wound to his vanity (did she think his teeth were so dirty?) had made him rude. He found a retrospective excuse in the reflection that it was against the school rules to go up into the dorms during the day.

On the other side of the wooden partition that separated his cubicle from Anthony's, Brian Foxe was stepping into his pyjamas. First the left leg, then the right. But just as he was starting to pull them up, there came to him, suddenly, a thought so terrible that he almost cried aloud. ‘Suppose
my
mother were to die!' And she
might
die. If Beavis's mother had died, of course she might. And at once he saw her, lying in her bed at home. Terribly pale. And the death-rattle, that death-rattle one always read about in books – he heard it plainly; and it was like the noise of one of those big wooden rattles that you scare birds with. Loud and incessant, as though it were made by a machine. A human being couldn't possibly make such a noise. But all the same, it came out of her mouth. It was the death-rattle. She was dying.

His trousers still only half-way up his thighs, Brian stood there, quite still, staring at the brown varnished partition in front of him with eyes that had filled with tears. It was too terrible. The coffin; and then the empty house; and, when he
went to bed, nobody to come and say good-night.

Suddenly shaking himself out of immobility, he pulled up his trousers and tied the string with a kind of violence.

‘But she
isn't
dead!' he said to himself. ‘She
isn't
!'

Two cubicles away, Thompson gave vent to one of those loud and extraordinarily long-drawn farts for which, at Bulstrode, he had such a reputation. There were shouts, a chorus of laughter. Even Brian laughed – Brian who generally refused to see that there was anything funny about that sort of noise. But he was filled at this moment with such a sense of glad relief, that any excuse for laughter was good enough. She was still alive! And though she wouldn't have liked him to laugh at anything so vulgar, he simply had to allow his thank-fulness to explode. Uproariously he guffawed; then, all at once, broke off. He had thought of Beavis.
His
mother was really dead. What must
he
be thinking? Brian felt ashamed of having laughed, and for such a reason.