The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (5 page)

She wore her dark hair, which looked as if it would otherwise have hung down to her waist, pinned up to show the long, furrowed nape of her neck and her pale white throat.

I saw her first in early fall and would, for the rest of my life, whenever we met, remember what the day was like, the sad, sweet smell of September in the air, a west wind and white caps on the water of the harbour, the silver undersides of the leaves showing as the gale moved through the trees. And Fielding like something that was part of, and would vanish with, the season, a girl as I had never noticed girls to be, a girl with goosebumps on her arms and strands of black hair blown forward round her face, one strand always wet, for it would catch between her lips. Fielding in the fall of 1912.

One day when Fielding was present, Prowse read aloud John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”:

License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land!

“Oh, my America, my New-Found-Land,” Prowse said, leering at Fielding. She seemed embarrassed and, blinking rapidly, looked about as though in search of something, pulled that rogue strand of hair from between her lips.

“What might you be staring at?” she said, stepping towards me, her two hands on her cane, which she planted on the ground in front of her.

“Your name is Smallwood is it not?” she said. I nodded. “Not much meat on your bones, is there?” I shook my head, suddenly aware of how I must look with my clothes flapping from my skinny frame. “Henceforth,” she said, “because you are so skinny, you shall be known as Splits, which in Newfoundland means ‘kindling’ and puns, quite nicely, I think, on the two halves of your absurd last name, Small and Wood.”

The boys laughed. I could think of nothing to say. I hoped she was finished with me. The smell of salt water was in the air, the wind onshore, a beckoning from the world beyond the cloistered confines of the school.

“I’ve heard your uncle sponsors you,” Fielding said, “because your father is a good-for-nothing drunkard.”

Again, I was speechless.

“What does Uncle do?” Fielding said.

I felt light-headed with recklessness, my heart pounding. Who cares, I thought, who cares; I don’t belong here anyway.

“My uncle is in boots,” I said. “Except when he’s in shoes and socks.”

The boys laughed.

“Very funny,” Fielding said, pursing her lips, one shoulder twitching nervously. She looked me up and down. “And what in God’s name does your
father
do?” said Fielding, as if she could not imagine what sort of man might be responsible for the existence of a boy like me.

“He lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children,” I said.

The boys went “Ooohhh” and Fielding blushed. Prowse clapped his hands together once and doubled over, not so much at what I had said, it seemed, as at this colliding of two worlds that he had engineered.

“Do you know something, Smallwood?” Fielding said. “You — you are —” I, we, waited for the
coup de grâce
. Her colour deepened. She looked away from me, blinked rapidly. The group, excepting Fielding and me, erupted in laughter at her frustration, throwing back their heads, doubling over with their hands on their knees, Prowse clapping me on the back in a kind of mock-congratulatory fashion, as if he had no doubt that despite my good showing, Fielding would soon make short work of me. I tried to assume a kind of “there’s plenty more where that came from” look.

Suddenly, on the verge of tears, the muscles of her face fighting, her chin blotched red and white, she turned and, without a word, marched off in the direction of Bishop Spencer, holding her skirts clear of the ground, her cane in one hand, head down. A great cheer went up. A few boys, like pack-emboldened dogs, followed her shouting “Boo-hoo” but keeping a cane’s-length distance between them and her. Prowse and another boy hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me about the pitch while the other boys followed behind. I had, I realized with dread, slain Fielding, whom the boys had obviously long thought was in need of slaying. Afraid of her, they had disarmed her by making her one of them, settled for being entertained by her, or pretending to be. I had slain Fielding, for now at least. I had done it by using the forbidden facts of Fielding’s life, which no one had ever dared use as ammunition against her, assuming she would respond with the full fury of her wit, all the vitriol that her manner seemed to say she was holding in reserve. But she had turned and run.

Word of the “good one” I had got off at Fielding’s expense soon spread throughout the school. “Did you hear what Smallwood said to Fielding?” one boy asked me, not knowing I was Smallwood. Everywhere boys repeated it to one another, everywhere little groups erupted in guffaws. “He lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children,” Prowse kept saying. “An example to fathers everywhere.”

For two days after our encounter on the playing grounds, Fielding stayed away from the Feild — the word from Bishop Spencer was that she did not come to school — a fatal mistake on her part. Had she been capable of wryly smiling through a day or two of teasing, her standing among the Townies and my standing at the school might not have changed much. But the two days she stayed away so magnified her humiliation that she could never live it down. When she came back, she rejoined Prowse’s group, but she was diminished in stature now, if not one of the rank and file, then certainly not among his favourites, following Prowse and the
rest of us about in sullen silence as if she dared not speak up for fear of provoking an allusion to her parents and thereby losing what little dignity she still had left.

One rainy Sunday, Fielding followed me when I headed out from the school grounds for my weekly visit home. She must have known my weekend routine and have been waiting outside the gate for me. She had an umbrella, as I did not, and made no effort to conceal herself, just hung back a couple of hundred feet, stopping when I stopped, walking when I walked. “What do you want, Fielding?” I shouted at her, hoping to cajole her into talking to me and perhaps even some sort of truce. It seemed to me that she was taking my fluke victory in our exchange of repartee far too seriously, that there was no reason we could not become friends and she could thereby regain her standing in the group as its presiding wit, which I was certain she deserved more than I did. I also felt guilty, for I knew that I had spoken cruelly, no more so than she had perhaps, but cruelly nonetheless, and the memory of her looking away from me, the expression on her face as she struggled to compose herself, stayed with me. She had been oblivious to the precariousness of her status among the Townies. To them, she was a prodigy of her gender, but they could have no real affection for her, or any compunction about setting upon her the instant a crack in her armour was revealed. She had achieved a certain fame by flouting the established order but had also thereby forsaken its protections and its privileges. I felt sorry for her, despite her unprovoked attack on me.

“What do you want, Fielding?” I shouted again, in as friendly and inviting a tone as I could manage at that volume.

She said nothing, however, just stood there with her hands on her cane, now and then looking at me.

I realized she wanted to see where I lived and I thought about trying to give her the slip or just walking aimlessly around until she got fed up and went away, but, figuring that sooner or later she would find my house, I headed straight for home. Fielding
followed me through town, gloating, it seemed to me, at my saturated state. It was October and the rain was cold, driven slantwise by the wind. Horses struggled up the slopes of the city, their hooves emerging from the muck with a series of sucking plops, their undersides and rumps spattered with mud. All the yellow water was running downhill and pooling on Duckworth Street and Water Street and Harbour Drive and overflowing into the harbour, the edges of which were cloudy, puddle-coloured. The world seemed turbulent and volatile, inciting Fielding to this foolishness.

I walked across the bridge and up the hill to the Brow. Every time I looked back, there she was, plodding up the slope with her umbrella, picking her way among the puddles until she saw that I had stopped, at which point
she
would stop, looking grateful for the rest. Even from that distance, I could see that despite the weather, she was out of breath and flushed from her exertions, not used as I was to climbing the Brow. I walked up the front steps of a house that, though it was no mansion, was far superior to ours and, as silently as I could, put my hand on the door knob. I looked down the hill. There was Fielding, expressionless, sullenly staring at me, but not fooled. She waited and, humiliated, I crept down the steps and resumed my journey home. Fielding followed at the same distance as before. This time, I went straight to our house and, once inside, peeked out through the curtains. Fielding, as if she thought I might somehow still be bluffing, stared a while longer, then, satisfied that she had seen my house, started down the hill again.

On the playing grounds the next day, Fielding spread the word among the Townies that I was a “Brow boy.” “He doesn’t live in town. He lives in a shack on the Brow,” Fielding said contemptuously. “He tried to fool me my by walking right up to the door of another house. My God, Prowse, you should see the place he lives in. I’ll take you there if you like.”

Everyone looked at Prowse, who stared at Fielding.

“What did you do, Fielding,” Prowse said incredulously, “follow Smallwood home?”

“No,” Fielding said, “I … I just—” She looked at Prowse, her blue eyes blurred with tears. Then she turned her back and, in a comic replay of her first retreat, marched off, skirts hiked, towards the road.

Among the other Townies, I was not so much well-liked as feared. The fallen Fielding was a constant warning to them of what might happen if they crossed me, and consequently I came to enjoy an undeserved and, after Fielding, unproven reputation as a counter-punching wit who, though he would not pick on you, would give better than he got if picked upon himself.

I was one of only a few boys who actually wanted to be at Bishop Feild. It was considered proper to be openly scornful of the place. Almost everyone at Bishop Feild had a chip on their shoulder about having to attend. For the well-to-do boys, being sent to Bishop Feild meant either that their parents were not quite so well-to-do that they could send them to public schools overseas or else that the boys were so academically unpromising there would have been no point in sending them.

A lot of boys made up stories about what they were doing there. A boy named Thompson claimed there was a rule at Eton that no more than two brothers from any family could attend and, as two of his brothers were already there, that let him out. “There are other schools, of course,” said Thompson grandly, “but when you come right down to it, they’re really no better than Bishop Feild, so why should my father waste his money?” This story was scornfully dismissed by most, but Thompson stuck to it.

Some claimed they were not long for Bishop Feild but would soon be moving on to Rugby, Sandhurst, Harrow, St. Wulfric’s, Gordonstoun. “In any good school, it’s really only the Fifth and Sixth forms that count,” a boy named Porter said. “Another year at Bishop Feild and then, thank God, I’m off to Harrow. I’ll never have to see you lot again.”

Certainly none of the masters, most of whom were itinerant Englishmen, wanted to be there. Almost to a man, they had either
tried unsuccessfully to find a place at some public school in Britain or some colony more highly prized than Newfoundland, or had had such a place and, for one reason or another, had been let go. The Feild was like some sort of Mecca for the oddly named. Among the masters there was Beadle Wagstaff, Ikey Samson, Polly Bernard, Askew Pridmore, Tasker McBain, Arthur Onions and a Frenchman who always introduced himself as Adolph E. Bernard, stressing the
E
as though there were some other Adolph Bernard that he was concerned he might be mistaken for. They seemed fated by their names to a kind of failure-induced eccentricity, though perhaps their eccentricities came first. Rumours abounded about their supposedly shady pasts, about why they had been dismissed from their former jobs and, though Eton- and Oxford-educated, had wound up in Newfoundland.

Most of the masters were wittily scornful of Newfoundland, delighted in itemizing its deficiencies and the many ways it fell short of being England, and were forever sending up local customs and traditions. They found the winters unbearably oppressive; the number of canings went up dramatically once the snow set in. Like the boys, they went to great lengths to make it clear that they were not long for Bishop Feild, that they had wound up there because of some fluke or temporary set-back and would soon be moving on.

The headmaster was a man named Reeves, a veteran of the Boer War who always walked about with a blackboard pointer tucked like a swagger stick beneath his arm. He had been too long at Bishop Feild to believe, or get away with pretending, that he would ever leave. He called Newfoundland “the Elba of the North Atlantic” and told us his job was to undo the damage done to us by more than a decade of living there. His job, he said, was not only to educate us, but also to civilize us, for it was plain to him that underneath our “imitation finery,” we were nothing more than savages descended from the “dregs of England.” (He did go back to England upon his retirement a decade later and is said
to have shouted, as his ship was sailing through the Narrows, “Goodbye, Newfoundlanders, you’re dirtier than the Boers.”)

We were taught next to nothing about Newfoundland, the masters drilling into us instead the history and geography of England, the country for which they were so homesick that they acted as if they were still there, denying as much as possible the facts of their existence. Every day in Lower Third history, which we took from Headmaster Reeves, we started class by drawing in detail a map of England. As the year went on, we got better and better at it, Reeves having us compete to see who could draw an acceptable likeness the fastest.