Facing the Tank (3 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. I think we’ve been invited to the same dinner party on Friday.’

‘So you’re Emma
Dyce
-Hamilton.’

‘That’s right. As opposed to Nelson’s bit of fluff.’

He laughed.

‘Well Friday’s some way off. Shall I come round this afternoon?’

‘No. Better not. I’ve got to go out.’ She had to do some housework.

‘How about Monday. After lunch?’

‘Two-thirty?’

‘Lovely.’

‘I’ll see you then, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Goodbye, Miss Hamilton.’

‘Bye.’

She replaced the receiver. Dr Feltram was playing the harpsichord next door. Emma slid the directory back into the hall bookcase and walked, whistling, to the cupboard under the stairs to find the Hoover. She would start at the bottom and work up.

They had left his trunk and strong box by the mountain of luggage that the porters were slowly dismantling, then they had taken a quick, discouraging glance at his dormitory and a slightly more cheering tour of the sitting room that was to be his
burrow
. A cup of stewed tea and a fondant fancy had followed with the
Lord
, the Master of Scholars and two keen, unmotherly wives. Crispin was the only new scholar this term. The others who had passed the fiendish entrance exam that spring would not arrive until September. Crispin’s mother had told him that Tatham’s wanted him earlier because he was so clever, but he had recently taken to sitting on the stairs when his parents thought he was in bed and so knew otherwise. The Governing Body were making an exception in his case because his father used to be a Tathamite (a fee-paying one) and because he could no longer afford to keep Crispin at his nearly-local day school, Drummond Lodge.

Crispin’s mother hated farewells and was keen to have this one over with as soon as possible.

‘Now darling, I must get back before the rush hour starts,’ she said, opening the car door. She stopped to fiddle with her purse and pull out a bank note. ‘Get yourself that book on dog breeding we saw,’ she said and pecked him briskly on the cheek. She had overpowdered and some of it fell off on to his shoulder. She giggled and brushed it off him then sat behind the wheel and shut the door. She looked a frump. He felt people watching. Crispin moved a little closer as she wound down the window. ‘Oh don’t look so
glum
, Crisp!’ she exclaimed, trying to cheer herself up. ‘Remember what Dad said last night. He was miserable for about a day and a half, then had the best five years of his whole life. Not very flattering for those who came later, hmm?’

He wouldn’t smile. He
would
not.

‘Say hello to him for me,’ he said, ‘and thank Sarah for the cake.’

‘I will.’ She started the engine but was forced to stay put by an enormous Jaguar which was reversing across her path.

‘She’s wishing she’d given the car a wash,’ thought Crispin.

‘Now we aren’t allowed to have you home for a Sunday for three weeks.’

‘It’s called an
exeat
,’ said Crispin. ‘Dad told me.’

‘Yes. But your godmother Emma lives just around the corner and I’m sure she’ll be allowed to smuggle you out for tea now and then. Ah. We’re off.’ Her relief was such that she had to bite on a smile.

‘You won’t forget, will you?’

‘No. I won’t,’ she called, wheeling out over the cobbles. ‘As soon as the puppies are born, I’ll let you know. Bye.’ She waved.

‘See you,’ he said, not waving back. Hers was the only old car in sight. Not vintage old, just fifteen years, dented-door old. The carpet was covered with torn maps and toffee wrappers and there were always empty fertilizer bags on the back seat in case she passed a good spot for firewood. The aerial had been snapped off and replaced with an unwound coathanger.

Crispin turned away from the gatehouse and crossed the cobbled quadrangle to his
burrow
. His trunk had been carried up to the dormitory, he saw. It would take hours to unpack. He had spent bad-tempered hours touring seedy ‘gentlemen’s outfitters’ in Leeds with his eldest sister Sarah in search of awkward items on the clothes list like galoshes and navy blue cotton-drill football shorts. Most of the football shorts were in brightly coloured imitation satin and they had to explain to several shop assistants what exactly galoshes were. Overtried tempers had frayed further at list-ticking time this morning when it was seen that they had failed to buy garters (‘two pairs – charcoal grey’). Crispin’s mother had hastily run up two rather messy pairs with white knicker elastic.

‘And if they tell you they’re the wrong colour they can bloody well dye them for you,’ she had snarled, chafing his calves as she tried one on him for size.

Third Burrow
was a broad, oak-ceilinged room with windows on to the cobbles at one side and a dank walled garden on the other. There were a grafitti-trimmed fireplace, several tired and unclean sofas, ten desks ranged around the walls and a bookcase with half the longer Oxford dictionary and a London telephone directory for S to Z. A note, evidently the work of a pupil, was pinned to one shelf. ‘The other half of this dictionary is in
Fourth Burrow
because there weren’t enough to go round. Remember we are grateful recipients of charity.’ Someone had added a comment after this in Greek which Crispin failed to understand. He had only been studying Greek a year and wanted to give it up in favour of more maths.

‘Is there a “Clay, Crispin of Runnymede Farm, Totley-St-Martha” in here?’ A boy with lank black hair and dark glasses was advancing, a thin white plastic walking stick in his hand.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m David Speake. I’m your
magister
and you’re my
oik
. Hello.’ He smiled the too-sharp smile of the blind and they shook hands.

‘Hello,’ said Crispin.

‘If we’re still speaking after your
Lingua
exam you can call me David or Speake but till then it’s
magister
from you and
oik
from me, I’m afraid. Actually it’s quite smart to pronounce it
meister
and to leave the
k
off the
oik
but I leave that up to your taste and discretion. Have you
sacked
your
womb
?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Has your mother left?’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘Very good-looking in a
distraite
sort of way, I gather. Jermyn quite fancied her. Is there a small, thin girl sitting cross legged, intent on a book?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’ll be her. Jermyn’s having a brief crisis about her sexuality. She’s the only girl – sorry, Jermyn, woman – in this burrow. But next door there are eight to be reckoned with. You’ve got desk four.’ He tapped rapidly along the desks, counting. ‘That’s this one, and this’ – he tapped the shelf above – ‘is your shelf and no one’s allowed to touch either on pain of severe rejection. Sorry I’m talking so much so fast, but I’ve got to go and play the organ for a bit.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Crispin.

‘Glad you approve. Now this,’ said David, producing a battered, pink-bound notebook, ‘is the key to our relationship. It’s the
Lingua
– well it’s a sort of
Reader’s Digest
version for beginners – and you’ve got to learn it all in three weeks. You’ll pick up quite a lot by necessity because everyone’ll be speaking it at you, but some of the rare stuff’s a bit harder. The house rules are in there too. Scholars have different ones from everyone else because we’re so special. If you fail the exam I don’t get let out on the first
exeat
and if you pass – when you pass, rather – you can buy me a box of after-dinner mints. Now I must fly. Have I forgotten anything?’

‘Gowns,’ said Jermyn, nose still in her book.

‘God yes. Thanks, Jermyn dear. Gowns. There’s a gown parade in the
piggery
– that’s the dining hall – at six. As you’re new you just stand to one side. An old sweetie called Dr Feltran inspects all our gowns for wear and tear and then he’ll notice you and issue you with yours. It’s on the house but you pay for repairs and you give it back when you leave. There’s a dinky little eighteenth-century waistcoat too, but that’s only for the winter months. I’ll be back before six to make sure you don’t get lost. Bye.’

‘Goodbye.’

His
magister
left in a wild flap of braille organ scores and Crispin noticed that his strong box had materialized by some unseen agency. It felt odd having grown men doing things for one. As the munificence of his scholarship had been explained to him in strictly historical terms using phrases like ‘sons of the indigent worthy’ and ‘episcopal patronage’ he had visualized his new life at Tatham’s as that of some put-upon waif or poor relation. Perhaps Tatham’s would prove to be like Drummond Lodge where hordes of servants appeared only hours before any massed parental occasion and vanished, pay packets in hand, in the wake of the last departing Volvo.

Crispin sat at his desk and opened the little pink book.
‘LINGUA’
it said over the school crest and a Latin motto which seemed to mean power through stealth, which couldn’t be right, ‘Being the Language and Principle Customs of Tatham’s School, Barrowcester (Revised 1946).’ He turned a page and read,

‘Never run when you could walk.

Never hum when you could talk.

Never talk when you could read.’

Someone had scribbled below this, ‘Never read when you could run’ and someone else below that,

‘Any man who runs when he could be eating is an idiot and a fresh-air prude.’

Crispin turned another page and found list upon list of seemingly pointless alternative vocabulary. A few words with bracketed references to dots on a small map of the school and surrounding streets were clearly proper nouns and excusable, but the bulk seemed to be childish, snide or nonsensical replacements of everyday words such as water, chair or blotting paper. Blotting paper was
parch
and water was
hoo
. For chair there were specifics:

‘Straight-backed dining chair –
sedan

Upholstered armchair –
bulldog
’

The generic term seemed to be
bench
. He turned more pages. There was a great deal to memorize in three weeks. He had been well trained in blind obedience. It was the one subject Drummond Lodge could be said to have taught thoroughly, being a preparatory school that compensated for the brevity of its history with disciplinary and power structures that provided a striking object lesson in the feudal system.

‘You can stick pictures up if you like,’ said Jermyn, who had finished her book. ‘I always do.’ She tossed her book on to her desk and left the room.

Crispin was alone. In the days that followed he was to discover what a rare luxury solitude could be. Although the general underpopulation of the school was a kind of privilege, it only served to accentuate the fact that one was hardly ever alone. After three or four minutes of peace, someone always walked in. They might ignore one and sit silently on the other side of the room but they were there. Only the girls, who lived with teacher’s families and in lodgings around town, had their own bedrooms. Boys slept twelve to a room and even had to use a vast Seventeenth-Century communal bath house called
jugs
. Crispin came to see the faintly Roman enjoyment that could be had from chatting and washing at the same time but he often longed for a small bathroom all to himself instead of
jugs
’s great arched chambers with their sluices and steam.

‘If you want to be alone,’ David would advise him the next morning, ‘you have to take a good book and lock yourself in the loo. It’s either that or take up the organ. Have you thought of the alto viol?’

Alone briefly on this first evening as a boarder, Crispin started to unpack his strong box. He put paper and pencil case in the desk and ranged his new dictionaries and battered Bible on his shelf. The only novels he had brought with him were
Call of the Wild
, a favourite he was rereading with deliberate nostalgia, and
Barchester Towers
. This looked dull but it was a present from his other sister, Polly.

‘It might help you understand where they’re sending you to live for the next five years,’ she had said darkly. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’

He would have liked to stick up pictures as Jermyn had suggested, but he had brought none with him. Perhaps on his first
exeat
he could pull a poster off his bedroom wall and bring that. He had brought one picture but it wasn’t one he would care to hang. He opened the crisp front cover of
Barchester Towers
to check that it was still there. Then felt a familiar prickling in his stomach and wished he hadn’t.

It was a photograph of Lottie, his dog. She was an extremely pretty mongrel. She was white with a brown splash on her back, fluffy ears and a tail like a squirrel’s. Crispin had been allowed to choose her from a litter born in a neighbouring farm a few days before his eleventh birthday. As she had grown his mother had said she looked like a Cavalier King Charles ‘gone wrong’. She was called Lottie after the assistant matron at Drummond Lodge with whom Crispin was madly in love at the time. The photograph was not an expert one, being ill-lit and lopsided, but it was typical in that Lottie had her head quizzically to one side and had been interrupted in dancing on Crispin’s bed. Looking at it, the gnawing sick worry of the past weeks – the melancholia his mother had mistaken for impending homesickness – came seeping back. The business of getting packed and saying goodbye to everyone had chased it briefly away but now he was alone, a naked prey.

Crispin had only recently started to masturbate. A friend had taught him as a kind of leaving present at Drummond Lodge. He kept up the practice religiously, not out of any great enjoyment, for he had scant material and insufficient knowledge for a vigorous fantasy life, but from a firm belief that it was not like riding a bicycle; that if he stopped for long he would forget how it was done. One evening several weeks back he had only just finished a strictly medicinal session before his bath when Lottie came pounding in through the door, leaped on the bed and licked him with wild excitement and not on the nose. He had suppressed the memory of this little incident, not least because of the guilty pleasure it had given him. When however his mother announced more recently that Lottie was unquestionably pregnant it came back to him and a terrible connection was made. He had sat at one end of the table while his mother teased Lottie at the other, saying,