A Treasonable Growth Read online

  A TREASONABLE GROWTH

  RONALD BLYTHE

  For Christine

  And, worst of all, a treasonable growth

  Of indecisive judgments, that impaired

  And shook the mind’s simplicity …

  William Wordsworth: The Prelude

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Copyright

  1

  MR WINSLEY himself let him in—and so immediately. How was that? Had he been watching and waiting? Had he been balanced upon one of the small armorial chairs prinked around the hall?—wicked, slippery, inhuman chairs with recessed rings cut in their seats for top-hats, and looking like frustrated commodes. Was he so intent on being the first to welcome a raw new master to the School that he could descend to the frigid hall and station himself behind the orange calix of a Morris lily, which was the one clear segment in the bubbly glass window of the huge front door? It seemed that he was.

  ‘Charles,’ Mr Winsley said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Richard,’ corrected Richard, and at the same time resenting this uncalled-for warmth.

  Mr Winsley nodded agreeably. Just as you wish, he implied. Charleses and Richards, they came and they went and they left a little instruction behind them. Unqualified teachers gypsying about from St This to St That’s, with their clothes and references scrambled together in fibre suitcases and their neckties vivid witnesses to the well-established tradition of their calling. ‘We like to think of ourselves as one big family at Copdock House,’ he said. ‘We have to be an institution, of course, but I hope you will discover for yourself that none of us subscribe to the grisly portentousness of that word. But come in, come in.’

  Richard said: ‘I should have let you know which train——’

  ‘Let us know——? But you did, dear boy. You did! This is Stourfriston! When our guests do not materialize on the nine-seventeen, then we switch our trust to the two-thirty. Thank God, we have never had the worry of what they call a “good service.”’ Mr Winsley rose compulsively on the balls of his feet and swayed. He had a pear-ish thinness of trunk and short fat legs. His habit of tiptoeing was his, now unconscious, way of protesting against the injustice of his physique. ‘Leave your bags for Darwin—against that chest I should think. They won’t get in the way there.’ He led the way across a high, dark hall with a certain amount of ritual. Occasionally he even went so far as to jerk an elbow or a thumb towards particular features of it, like an anxious guide in Chartres or Knole who suspects a faldstool is not getting its fair share of wonder. Note the stairwell, Mr Winsley insisted and Richard saw a huge ochre core capped by a purple dome and festooned with photogravure reproductions of Great Paintings. In the landing window just above his head, a north Oxford St Sebastian flaunted a delicate biscuit-coloured nudity. About three feet up from the skirting ran a bas-relief dado of plaster marigolds. Dotted about the floor were satchel-laden settles. A large crocketted hatstand held one dirty cap and some ancient visiting cards tucked in its deleterious mirror.

  At the stairs Mr Winsley paused and said: ‘It was, you see, her home….’

  ‘Before it was a school?’

  ‘Before she made it into a school.’

  ‘I see … I hope Miss Bellingham is well,’ Richard added politely, thinking it odd that she hadn’t wanted to see him. Her signature on the letter appointing him had been the only real indication of her existence—that and her name on the door-plate. Mr Winsley had conducted the interview and it had been unflatteringly obvious that he had not only been the lone candidate, but the single applicant. When he had written to Quentin, telling him that he had got the job, Quentin had replied, ‘Oh yes, there had been a Miss Bellingham and she had founded some kind of prep school, but surely both were dead as Hannah Moore?’ But Mr Winsley was looking at him queerly.

  ‘Miss Bellingham well, did I hear you ask?’

  ‘I just wondered as she wasn’t at the interview——’

  ‘She is in excellent health, thank God.’

  They were passing fire-extinguishers and buckets of sand, the latter liberally spattered with spit marks. The floor was ceramic, its colour liver-red. Here and there, sanguinely adrift, were a few portrait tiles of the Angevin kings, their necks awry, their limbs gravely dislocated. The banister-rail was a phalanx of cast-iron asphodels. The almost unerring bad taste of nearly everything the School contained coalesced into such a single-mindedness of wrongly applied aesthetic principles that the result was in some frightful way admirable. Say what you like, thought Richard, taking it all in all, it’s something!

  ‘I’ve seen the School lots of times, but only from the outside—usually when Quentin—he’s my brother—and myself were on the way to Cambridge.’

  ‘You couldn’t have,’ said Mr Winsley quickly, ‘it can’t be seen from the station.’

  ‘I—we were bicycling, Sir.’

  ‘Bicycling …’ Mr Winsley puffed innuendo into the word.

  ‘And it was a long time ago.’ Now that he considered it, there was something, well otiose, about bicycling to Cambridge—particularly where Quentin was concerned.

  Mr Winsley looked comforted. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘boys’ energies!’ He smiled and the blue and vermilion veins webbed across his cheeks tilted and crinkled into small deltas of apparent sagacity.

  They came to a chocolate-brown door embellished with more asphodels, this time in the form of copper finger-plates. It opened with a similar clairvoyance to the one in the hall and showed Mrs Winsley, a little, shining-eyed woman burdened with an intricate cushion of greying gold hair, the front of it impolitically blued.

  ‘My wife. Minna, this is Mr Brand.’

  ‘At last,’ she said and a pronounced smell of cooking told him why. The Winsleys, knowing that there was not such a thing as a restaurant car on the train, had waited lunch. It was ten to three. He hardly knew what to say.

  ‘Charles knows Stourfriston, he says,’ Mr Winsley began and Mrs Winsley opened her foolish doll’s eyes wide and said: ‘Oh really! You sit here will you, Charles.’

  ‘It’s Richard——’

  They laughed explosively at one another and Mr Winsley said: ‘Now don’t you take any notice of Minna; she’s forever getting names wrong.’

  ‘Cadman …’

  But Mr Winsley only went on laughing and Richard, recognizing the merry apologia which conceals the disastrousness of so many marriages, the too-jolly laugh, the boisterous void of certain conversations, felt it best to add his own grin and say nothing more. The food was welcome and they meant to be kind. He ought to leave it at that.

  ‘Your brother—did I hear you mention that he was at March?’ Mr Winsley was asking.

  ‘He is the Senior English master there.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Mr Winsley said, and then, ‘March …’ his tone implying, yes, yes, I know March—one of those too public public schools!

  Mrs Winsley pressed her chignon and said hurriedly: ‘The news is dreadful, isn’t it. I expect you’ve seen the papers this morning. They’re going to have another blackout test on Sunday night. I still remember the last time, you know!’ She gave a little triumphant chuckle as though scoring some sort of historic point.

  ‘We’ve got to have our measure of safety, my dear,’ insisted her husband. He bared his rose-pink dentures at Richard in a demand for cor
roboration. He was bending over the casserole and disturbing its contents with small, inquisitive thrusts of a fork and tablespoon. ‘Yet,’ he went on, ‘it would be criminal on our part for us not to appreciate just a little of their point of view—’ Here a slight gesture of dissent, or perhaps, embarrassment from Mrs Winsley caused him to sweep the hand with the fork in it in her direction. ‘I’m not saying anything more than what was said at the Lorrilows’ on Wednesday night, now am I, Minna? You see’, he went on, switching his allegiance to Richard, ‘we can breathe! There is Australia—New Zealand. Rhodesia. We don’t have to be squeezed up as they are, a great and growing nation, between the Baltic and the Northern Latin bloc. Now if you ask me, Herr Hitler …’

  ‘Caddie—not now, darling. Everything’s getting cold….’

  Mr Winsley, looking displeased, turned to Richard and asked abruptly, ‘What made you decide on our little school—eh?’

  Why? That was a good one! Richard felt like offering his own disillusioned laughter to the general spurious enjoyment. Graceless answers flipped their way through his brain. One, it was two hundred a year. Two, because, unlike Quentin, he didn’t possess a degree, which cut out March and any of the more or less decent schools. Three, destiny. Wasn’t he the kind of person who was born into a Copdock of one sort or another? Hadn’t he the perfect background? There was a margin of so-called ‘decent employment’ for the offspring from country rectories, and it included amateur schoolmastering. At first Richard had made a mistake about this. He had forced his way into a bank thinking that he could scoop and lick and count and weigh like anyone else and still have time to work out rhyme-endings, or jot down his impressions of people and life. He thought of Charles Lamb on his office stool and even of T. S. Eliot, whose poetry seemed to have landed him in a boardroom. But something had gone wrong. He hadn’t been able to divide himself properly. Eventually he left and they presented him with a note-case because he had been with them just over the year. A leatherette note-case—that’s what one got for flying in the face of destiny…. Yes, the bank had been a distinct mistake. Now it occurred to him that he had picked on its alternative too precipitously. There was something quite wrong about Copdock, wrong in the most subtle, the deepest dyed sense. Above Mrs Winsley’s head he noticed the windjammers anchored forever in their water-colour sea—becalmed and benighted in a gentle waste where it would always be sunset and evening star…. Nine ebony elephants trundled across the lid of the piano. Two bronze youths wrestled with two wild bronze horses. Each of these things appeared to him at that moment to be offering a more romantic solution to the problem of what he should do. Where he should go. In the middle of the mantelpiece a simpering girl swung time away under the French clock. He saw that Mrs Winsley was so interested in his reply that she had stopped eating and her fork was poised so that it reflected against her tight waxen throat.

  ‘Well for one thing I’ve always liked Stourfriston itself—’

  Mr Winsley, looking even more displeased, dug away at his food. It was clear he had hoped for some sort of enthusiasm. This constant lack of enthusiasm in others was the chief reason for his being always so irritably upon the defensive. But Mrs Winsley was saying, ‘It’s not much of a town—would you call it much of a town, dear?’ Her eyes shone with flattering enquiry. Richard saw that she had made it her rule never to know the answers. She was twisting a strand of white beads round and round as she spoke. Every now and then her hands would drop the beads and fly to her hair as though some nodule of its elaborations was about to drop off. Her attitude was almost oriental. She had become, over the long years of her marriage, as compliant and as agreeable as a meringue. It was obvious that she would give her soul to keep the peace.

  ‘I like it,’ her husband said sharply.

  ‘Oh, I like it, Caddie; I was just wondering why Char—why Mr Brand did.’

  ‘Merely because of its size, Mrs Winsley. It’s something like five thousand, isn’t it?’

  ‘Something like that, but Caddie will know.’

  ‘Five thousand, three hundred and seventy,’ pronounced her husband oracularly.

  ‘There!’ she said, pleased.

  A sudden uproar cut across the meal. An uninhibited descent of the bare stairs outside the door of an avalanche of clattering feet, caused the room to tremble like matchwood. Mrs Winsley, who had affected to be distracted by a clumsy movement of the luncheon table, remained quite unmoved by this racket. She went on eating placidly. Mr Winsley, chewing hard, looked from his watch to the gilded girl and said: ‘Half-past. Bateson’s late again.’

  ‘Mr Bateson is to be your neighbour,’ Mrs Winsley smiled. ‘We’re all very fond of him. He’s our coach.’

  The row stopped and left a torpid silence in its place. There was a moment of revelation as a wink of sunlight strove to pierce the dirty window, a moment when Richard thought he was about to discover the secret of Copdock, of its boxed-up rooms, of the same air being used over and over again, of experiences emasculated by repetition and used until they were threadbare; of the strict precautions taken to see that nothing ever actually happened. The interview had been like that, uninquisitive—decorous almost. Yet at the same time insisting that whoever it was who was offered and who accepted the post, should also realise that they had been offered (and must accept) Copdock, lock, stock and tradition. New brooms, new methods—new anything—just weren’t called for. Acceptance was what was required. At the time Richard thought it quite easy to comply with such conditions. After all, he didn’t want to be a schoolmaster, he wanted to be a writer and Copdock would have the same long holidays as any other school. Just the thought of his writing made him feel much better. This was only a job after all. He must remind himself of this whenever he felt depressed. He said: ‘I heard—only the other day, as a matter of fact—that my father knew Miss Bellingham a little. They met occasionally at meetings of the Archaeological Society in Ipswich. I … I’m quite looking forward to seeing her.’

  Mr Winsley turned on him with extravagant interest. ‘Oh, are you?’ he said, and his tone implied, I’m afraid she’s hardly likely to be doing the same with regard to you!

  Mrs Winsley hurried in with her kindness. ‘She’s awfully old now, that’s why she never comes down, you know.’ Did the ghost of malice haunt her words? Richard couldn’t be sure.

  ‘She’s eighty.’ Behind his sturdy spectacles Mr Winsley’s eyes flickered and swam like minnows. ‘It’s a great age and in Miss Bellingham’s case, a great achievement …’ And then, more indulgently, ‘When I came to Copdock, Miss Bellingham was forty, just forty! … think of that!’

  Richard tried not to think of it, but ages and dates added and subtracted from each other in his brain. Forty years ago Mr Winsley was twenty-four—or thereabouts. Mrs Winsley, too. And what about Bateson? They said he was the coach, but it still didn’t prevent Richard from imagining some venerable figure heeling down the turf with a rheumaticky foot. ‘And Mr Bateson …?’ he enquired.

  ‘When did Bateson come, Minna?’

  ‘The Jubilee, Caddie—surely you remember!’

  Before Richard could hide his disappointment—it was, as Quentin had implied, a hopeless, helpless, senile dump after all—Mr Winsley was saying, ‘Nineteen-thirty-five—so long! That’s over three years ago. It’s incredible!’

  Relieved, Richard muttered something about Bateson obviously liking Copdock since he hadn’t wished to change and was going on to say that all he himself wanted to do was to settle down in some job where he felt he was going to be of real use—in fact, a conciliatory little speech to set his own and the Winsleys’ minds at rest; when he was prevented from doing so by the sudden fear in Mr Winsley’s face.

  We all have words which lacerate, if they do not destroy, our peace of rnind. They taunt us from hoardings. They forsake their context and leap out of the newspapers at us. If they are on the page of a book we see them before any others. They describe our hopes and our guilt. ‘Change’ to Cadman Winsley had
proved itself to be a desolatingly haunting word. It rang in his ears like a faulty bell—change—sinuous, nasal; a syllable suspended over him as threateningly as a Damoclean sword. One day it would really fall and he would be destroyed. Deep down, deeper than the virile declamation of his tobacco-yellow moustache, or the contentment declared in the rise of his high, soft, indulgent little belly, or in the arrogant fluttering of his pale eyes, there lurked his buried self. And what a self! Another individual who was, in his way, as much ‘Cadman Winsley’ as the touchy elderly schoolmaster who concealed him. This creature thrived on a diet of words like ‘battle—banner—soldier—regiment—glory’ O the brave music of a distant drum! General Wolfe, it is said, would rather have written an elegy than win his war. Mr Winsley would have given ten years of his schoolmastering life to have been gazetted as Major Winsley … He had preserved his boyhood visions, sepia in tone, since they derived from those excellent pencil drawings in old copies of the Illustrated London News; in which a certain gallant officer marched, galloped and fought. Sometimes as he sat in class, he saw it all, even now—the troopships behind him and in front of him, the Residency lights. One day, he used to tell himself, I shall change. But, of course, he had never changed and now the very word terrified him. Since his decision to make the best of things as they were, he no longer cared to picture them as they might have been. And he wouldn’t have to—except for ‘change’. Why did people always have to drag the thing up? Just when he might be happy and somebody! Instead of replying he said moodily,

  ‘You’d better see your room. I expect you want to unpack.’

  This reminded Richard of his luggage left downstairs in the hall, his father’s old suitcase still lettered J.L.B. and a small canvas affair marked ‘Stella Brand’. Grossly inadequate luggage it now seemed, small and paltry and not even personal. When he said that his books were coming by Carter Paterson it was more to cheer himself up than to semi-apologise to the Winsleys.