HARRY MENGEL wouldn’t go. He hadn’t liked the man, he said, and the man hadn’t liked him, and anyway he owed him a great deal of money, and he wouldn’t believe the man was honest till the will was proved: besides, he said, he was a married man now, and he couldn’t trust Joan to look after the shop for him, and she didn’t want to go, either, and what the hell did I think I was doing going to his funeral when everyone knew I’d hated his guts?
I had, too, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to see him buried. I like to pay my respects to my enemies, and old Hobson was an enemy of the highest class, a man with whom I had absolutely nothing in common, whose every opinion was loathsome to me, who treated me like some menial, and who had a wife called Evangeline, which is going about as far as you can go in picking a wife with a wholly suitable and ridiculous name. But I need enemies, I’m really no good without someone to fulminate against, and there weren’t that many people in Cartersfield who were worth fulminating against. Because to detest someone, he’s got to be worthy of your detestation, and most of the people in Cartersfield aren’t even worth as insipid an emotion as liking, let alone a full-blooded hatred. And that was why I was at his funeral, to everyone’s surprise, including my own, and one or two people tried to hint that it wasn’t in the best of taste for me to show up, but that just shows the sort of people one’s up against.
I wish I knew what really killed the old fool, but I don’t, and I refuse to believe that it was anything as trite as a heart attack. Men like Hobson have a heart attack every time they open a newspaper, and call it indigestion. All I know is that he sat up with a gun trying to shoot whoever it was smashing his bathing pool, and a few days later he was dead, and everyone said it was those Teddy boys who were responsible. At least fools of a lesser quality than Hobson thought so, men like the headmaster. He gave the whole school a lecture one morning at Assembly, and told them that morale wasn’t as high as it should be, whatever that might mean, and then he said morals were loose, and everyone immediately thought another couple of kids had been caught necking without any clothes on, but it wasn’t that, alas. ‘Some boys,’ he said, ‘it has been brought to my notice’ (he always inverted everything, so you had to wait till the end of a sentence to find out what was going on, and rearrange it to make sense. While you were doing that you missed the next sentence, so you were grateful, in a way), ‘have been engaged, wantonly, in the destruction of private property, to all our disgust. Those who are guilty will understand to what I refer. I know who they are. I want them, of their own accord, to come, of their own free will, and own up to me. I shall be in my office throughout the hour set aside for lunch. And I may warn you all, even those who have no knowledge of this matter, as yet, that if this vandalism recurs, the matter will be taken up by an authority higher than mine.’ For a moment I hoped he meant God, but he didn’t, he meant the police, though no one there would have guessed, because he walked out then to a thunderous silence, no one having a clue what he was talking about. Silly idiot, he really believes people understand and use his kind of language.
Luckily he called in the staff during the morning break to ‘apprise’ us, as he put it, of what the hell he had been talking about. Some joker had carried one of the henhouses Hobson left down at his stinking gravel-pit (those places have long been insanitary in my opinion) to an island and left it there filled with whisky bottles. He even hinted that there were other more distressing discoveries, though we had to imagine those for ourselves, and I think he was making them up. Well, what interested me was who would have both the strength and the sense of humour to do such a thing to Hobson, but no one had any idea, and of course no boy went and spilled the beans to the headmaster, he just wasn’t the sort of man who could get away with a bluff, and when he said he knew who was responsible the lie was taken exactly for what it was worth, that is to say it probably never even entered the calculations of any of the guilty ones as a remote possibility, supposing any of the guilty ones to have been present.
About that I’m not so sure, because I caught one of my brighter pupils at the end of the last hour that afternoon and asked him what it was all about. He was called Richard Thomson, and his father had a farm over at Mendleton. It was his last term, so he hadn’t got much to lose.
‘I don’t know a thing about it, Mr Drysdale, honest.’
They all say that. ‘Now come off it,’ I said. ‘You live a mile and a half away, and you haven’t heard or seen anything? Nothing at all?’
‘No, sir, I haven’t seen a thing.’
‘Look, Thomson, Dick, whatever you call yourself, you know me, and I know you, and I’m not asking you to incriminate yourself, though you’ll be lucky to stay out of the courts all your life, if you ask me. I’m asking you for information, that’s all. What’s going on down there?’
‘I really don’t know, Mr Drysdale. I’m not one of that sort.’
‘What sort?’
‘The sort that does that sort of thing.’
‘Sort,’ I said, ‘what do you mean, sort? Don’t they teach you in English not to say sort? Say what you mean. What sort of thing? And what sort of people?’
‘Jesus, Mr Drysdale—–’
‘Don’t swear in front of a master. Swear as much as you like at home, in front of your mother and father, but never in front of a master. Go on.’
‘Honest,’ he said, and he tried to look pious and innocent, a thing I loathe in a boy, ‘I don’t know what goes on.’
‘Well, why did you tell me you weren’t one of that sort?’
He opened his mouth to say he didn’t know anything about it, Mr Drysdale, honest he didn’t, again, so I said: ‘Oh, get out, you make me sick.’ Because if there was one thing that was obvious it was that he did know something. A boy never admits to total ignorance unless he is implicated in the crime in some way or another, it’s an infallible rule with adolescents. If they’re really innocent they’ll tell you what they heard in the playground or the lavatory, total fabrication, probably, but something. But then it was a hot day, and I had been a bit short with him, and perhaps he was just scared, though I didn’t think so. He’d once put a heavy roller in the canal, with some other boys, and he didn’t scare easily. But I couldn’t be bothered with him, and anyway he would never have had the guts or imagination to move the second hut, and then set an island on fire. Those gravel-pits were scenes of great social activity in warm weather, especially at week-ends, with the young men flashing about in front of the girls, thinking they were sexy, I suppose, showing off by diving and disappearing under the water with goggles and breathing-pipes, pretending they were submarines, ha, ha. It was as bad as Blackpool or Brighton, only they didn’t have piers, thank God, and people eating jellied eels and candy floss all over the place. They drowned someone every year or two, and often they didn’t find the body, because the water was very deep in some places, and very shallow in others, and so it was almost impossible to drag for the corpse. I always maintained that we had a Cartersfield Monster, like at Loch Ness, which liked to eat people, but then I was told I was in bad taste again, so I knew I’d scored a hit and was satisfied to leave it at that.
I was thinking about the possibility of the Monster being real, actually, as I stood at the edge of the crowd and watched them lower old Hobson into the earth. Everyone had talked about orgies down at the gravel-pits, not that anyone in Cartersfield has the remotest idea of what an orgy is. Hobson obviously thought an orgy was a sort of pillow-fight, remembering midnight feasts in the dormitories at Sandhurst or whatever benighted school produces men like that, and everyone else thought they were something to do with the cinema. I’m convinced that Harry Mengel, for instance, particularly as he was only just back from his honeymoon, a notorious time to develop new sexual fantasies, would consider an orgy was something to do with gaggles of girls with practically no clothes on, and those clothes mere diaphanous wisps, lying around on multi-coloured velvet cushions in flickering million-watt torchlight, waiting for Nero or some other piece of historical clap-trap to come home from the arena. Cecil B. de Mille and other kings of the celluloid Orient have a lot to answer for, if you ask me, though I am not the man to object to reinterpretation of biblical classics in Freudian terms and with additional dialogue. Anyway, I was thinking how very little like an orgy was the scene round the grave in Cartersfield churchyard. Everyone was there, and a lot of people I’d never seen before—the people Hobson was always invoking when he wanted to get something done, I suppose—all suitably black, and sweating, like me, because it was another boiling day, and poor old Jim Nelson, the grave-digger, must have had a pretty hard time because the earth was as dry as a bone. Usually Cartersfield churchyard is a sort of quagmire, and you can hear a splash as the coffin goes in, because the water-level is higher than the legalized depth of a grave. I’m not much of a man for funerals, actually, but this one did have that advantage—no splash—and anyway the people were all at their absolute worst, which gave the occasion a peculiarly macabre charm. Henderson hardly seemed to know what was going on, turning over two pages at once at one moment, and looking round in a bewildered way as though it was the first time he’d ever presided over someone’s interment, and making a wholly incomprehensible speech (I suppose he thought it was a sermon) about how we all loved old Hobson. Mrs Hobson’s back was as straight as ever, and she didn’t even wear a veil, letting everyone see and know how well she was taking it, and she had quite a lot to take, because her awful son Hubert, who was an interior-decorator in London and hadn’t been seen for years, was sitting beside her and ogling one of the choir-boys almost audibly, and his suit was so well cut it seemed to cling to him. I have a suspicion it was made of satin, but I didn’t try to get near to confirm this. The Gilchrist family were all there playing the role of Lord of the Manor for all it was worth, the old man reading something in a voice which rang round the church like a gong, and his wife looking thoroughly sensible but sad, and the two children obviously wishing they hadn’t come, the girl overcome by the whole thing and the boy muttering to himself all the time, though what I don’t know. Then old Nye, the doctor, sat looking at his watch all the time in a callous way, while his wife kept nudging him. I was sitting at the back, and after a while I just couldn’t stand it, so I slipped quietly out into the porch and listened to the drone inside, and looked at the sun pouring down outside, and suddenly I became extremely angry that poor old Hobson should have to go this way, with an idiot like Henderson mumbling nonsense and Gilchrist being self-important and Evangeline (how could she have stuck with that name all her life?) being ostentatiously brave, and Hubert being ostentatiously repulsive, and everyone wishing the whole thing would be over. I hadn’t come to see the old fool mocked.
I went and hid behind the church till they should come out, so I could join in again when they finally dumped him, and I thought about why I was there, and I decided that he’d become a habit with me, like tobacco, and though you may know tobacco is killing you, you go on smoking it because you like it, the actual smoking. And Hobson and I had smoked at each other often enough. And I felt he’d been cheated, he shouldn’t have died in that scruffy way, just keeling over suddenly and then being hurried into the ground by a lot of people who didn’t give a damn, really. I was going to miss him, I realized, to my intense annoyance. It was as though he’d been a nice wall to lean against all my life—or for the last ten years and more—and now the wall wasn’t there any more to push against and write rude words on. It was like being north and suddenly finding that south had disappeared. We’d been opposites, you see, and what he believed to be true I knew to be false, and vice versa. Even in a miserable hole like Cartersfield living isn’t just a matter of occupying space, you have to exist, whether you like it or not, in relation to other objects occupying space, and when one of the space-fillers goes there’s a vacuum, and, if I remember rightly, nature abhors a vacuum. And you have to go and look at the hole where the person used to be, whether you loved the person or hated him, or even if you felt totally indifferent to him, and no one could say that I had ever felt indifferent about Hobson.
I was really getting quite sentimental about the whole business (funerals always make people cry, because the script is so good), and beginning to think that perhaps I’d better go home, when they all came out of the church, the pall-bearers wobbling under Hobson’s weight in the hot sun, so I went and joined them, discreetly hovering at the edge of the crowd and trying not to let myself get angry when women took out handkerchiefs and strong men allowed a single tear to start from the edge of their right eye. Hubert kept peering over his mother’s shoulder to see if there was anything in the throng for him, and I managed to catch his eye and glare at him, whereupon he looked, to my horror, delighted, so I didn’t look in that direction again. The whole thing was a farce, it was extremely hot, everyone was longing to get his coat off, Hubert was wondering what there was in the will for him, Gilchrist was still overcome with how well he’d read in the church, Nye had slipped off, it all looked like one of those awful historical paintings where it’s quite obvious that the figures are all models hard up for a little extra cash.
At last it was all over, and everyone went away, asking each other in low voices to come and have a drink tomorrow, and I was in a fearful rage by that time, so I simply went home and put on some reasonable clothes and started off on a walk across country, heat or no heat. And what really annoyed me, I think, was that no one seemed to realize that however much of a fool Hobson had been, and he had been a really very big one most of the time, he did stand for things. He had poisonous opinions, but he followed them through to their logical conclusions and then tried to put them into effect, when there wasn’t someone like me to shout from the roof-tops that it was a monstrous invasion of liberty, or some equally idiotic phrase which woke people up. He had absolutely nothing to do, but he was alive, so he took it on himself to try and run the place, imposing his poisonous opinions and generally making a complete cock-up of everything, but at least he did try, which is more than can be said for anyone else. He was, too, the last representative in our parts of the really old days, when people thought a gun-boat was something you wore on your foot and kicked people with, when you could say ‘British’ with the absolute conviction that you meant ‘best.’ I don’t, of course, say that his conviction was good for Britain, or even for Cartersfield, and it didn’t do him or Evangeline much good, either, I dare say, but it was something that was once real for a good many people, and isn’t any longer, except for people like Hobson and a lot of frauds who’ve shut their minds to everything that’s happened since they learnt, unfortunately, to speak. But Hobson had left the nursery, you could say that for him, he wasn’t spilling patriotic baby-food down his bib like an Empire Loyalist, he knew what things were like once, and he felt they ought to be like that still. And when you come to think of it, a life in the Army has probably stayed more in touch with 1900 than any other life you can live these days, what with polo and the Guards and all that expensive rubbish.
So it was perverse of God or Death or the Spirit of Evolution or whatever nonsense you choose to believe in, I really can’t bring myself to care, to let him die in that humiliating way, and then be buried as though he was just anyone else. He was a silly bloody fool, and he didn’t know what was going on, but when his blood was up it stayed up, and it was real blood, not the sort of plastic substitute you get when you knife—well, never mind who, but you can guess the sort of people I mean, the sort that think it’s clever to shout ‘Shoot the wogs’. Hobson was incapable of that kind of witless vulgarity. He would have thought of them as wogs, certainly, and he would have been completely convinced of his own superiority to them, but he would never have had the bad manners or been so purblind as to shout anyone’s slogans.
So it was a bloody shame that he had to go and die because his blood was up over some ridiculous Teddy boys, who didn’t and could never understand that a man like him was a real human being under all that bombast, unlike themselves, who were merely worms with long hair and Edwardian coats and indecently tight trousers. Always supposing that it really was Teddy boys he was sitting up for, which no one has ever proved, the police here being about as astute as those chickens you can hypnotize with a chalk line. But let’s suppose it was Teddy boys, because then you can see what I mean: they couldn’t wear Edwardian clothes, the genuine article, I mean, if they tried for a million years, they’d simply look like a lot of worms with long hair on a fancy dress parade. But Hobson could, metaphorically speaking, and if you follow me, wear them without looking ridiculous for one millionth of a second. And though I am no defender of Edward the Seventh, or the Eighth, come to that, I do respect genuineness when I see it, which is rare enough these days.
So it was an outrage against his whole nature that he should die because he insisted on sitting up in a duck-decoying outfit half the night trying to get a crack at worms. Because they weren’t worth it, and he should have found some more dignified way of popping off. He deserved an adversary of his own quality, someone who would bring out the full measure of the man. And it made me furious that his own stupidity should be responsible for such an inglorious end. England’s a bloody enough country, and Cartersfield’s a bloody enough town, without having to turn an honourable man into a mockery. Sometimes I really wonder how people like Hobson and I survive at all, and perhaps we shouldn’t. But whichever way you choose to look at it, it was a bloody shame he couldn’t have found someone to have a real battle with before he let himself be lowered into the hard earth of the graveyard, with that idiot Nelson to shovel the dirt on top of him and with those appalling people sniffling around. And I really felt for a day or two that I was the only man who’d ever appreciated him.