‘Because I’ve been sacked, if you want to know!’
The door of Arthur Aylwin’s study, which had opened without ceremony to admit his elder son Robin, closed with a bang again upon these words. The boy had come and gone within thirty seconds. To Arthur’s ‘Robin, why on earth are you here?’ this had been the reply, flung with what was perhaps the rudeness of desperation across the room. Arthur and I had time only to glance at each other in consternation when we heard another door slam. Robin had run upstairs and shut himself into some fastness of his own.
I see that to a reader with a ready visual faculty my description of this scene may prove misleading. I’ve called Robin Aylwin a boy, so that the picture conjured up could be of a thirteen-year-old only lately promoted to long trousers. But Robin was eighteen, well-grown and the owner of an electric razor, I’d been told, given him on his birthday; and he had revealed himself during his brief irruption as dressed in the thoroughly adult clothes in which the senior pupils at his kind of boarding school are accustomed to travel. In short, it was a young man who had momentarily stood between us. The sharpness of my own perception of this was to come back to me later.
Robin’s tone and bearing, nevertheless, had been thoroughly juvenile, and in these first seconds I believe it was this that chiefly shocked me. The normal manners of the Aylwins in their own home were of Mary Aylwin’s creating; it was of her assumptions that they carried the stamp. I suppose the household went in for rows from time to time, but anything of the sort was certainly too infrequent to have come within my observation. The Aylwins always seemed to preserve towards one another a certain distance and courtesy. This, which was wholly unobtrusive and unoppressive, would have appeared distinctly odd in my own childhood home, and perhaps I liked it on that account. On challenge I’d have to admit, of course, that these upper-class conventions of conduct are very vulnerable to criticism, particularly as sweeping far too much under the mat. Yet here I was, at this moment which begins my story, chiefly upset because Robin Aylwin had been shouting and banging doors.
I ought to have had more sense. To be expelled from school – which appeared to be what Robin had to confess – is something very dire to the young imagination. It constitutes awful and ultimate disgrace in school-stories; in such romances it is invariably explained to those upon whom the dreaded sentence is pronounced that their careers are wrecked and their lives blighted forever. If this sanction had indeed been visited upon Robin he was surely entitled to blow off a certain amount of steam without censure. Certainly he did better to bang and shout than to blubber.
These thoughts were cut short by a second glance at Robin’s father. Arthur’s face was drained of colour, and I could see that he was actually trembling. The sudden catastrophe had bowled him over completely. Simultaneously I was aware in myself of two quite distinct currents of feeling. The first was sharply and surprisingly critical of my old friend. I felt, perhaps unjustly, that Arthur himself was within reach of blubbering; I recalled, and certainly with accuracy, that by temperament he was inclined to meet disaster a little more than halfway. My second feeling was that here was disaster – obscure as to its details but indubitable as to the fact. I felt suddenly ashamed of being childless, since childlessness was a state which could leave me only groping for a basis of full sympathy with Arthur now. It was merely in imagination that I could myself receive anything like the force of this totally unexpected blow.
That it was totally unexpected there could be no doubt whatever. I preserved indeed a faint sense that Robin had been in some ways a tricky child to bring up. But he had appeared to settle down very well to public school life; and he was by now either a School Prefect or a House Prefect, I wasn’t sure which. Moreover he had a good deal of his father’s intellectual ability, although he was supposed to be less brilliant than his younger brother, Julian. His final year at school, I supposed, was being devoted to working for an Open Scholarship at an Oxford or Cambridge college. Had he run into trouble of any seriousness in the recent past, or even been in danger of anything of the sort, I was fairly sure that I’d have heard about it from Arthur. Arthur’s foreboding side, which might be called intermittent and irruptive, was not much encouraged by Mary, and as a consequence it was usually to me, if I was available, that it presented itself.
‘Good God, Frank!’ Arthur sank down in a chair, and then at once stood up again. ‘I suppose he meant what he said? He wasn’t joking?’
‘He certainly wasn’t joking. And we have to take it that whatever has happened is something he feels bad about. It doesn’t follow that it actually is all that bad. A schoolboy’s views can be very limited.’ This was, for the time being, as cheerful a face as I could see how to put on the matter. And what really disturbed me about it was precisely what Arthur went on to now.
‘Absolutely out of the blue! No previous warning from the place – not a line, not so much as a telephone call. I wouldn’t have believed that such a thing could happen.’
‘It could happen here at Oxford, I imagine? An undergraduate could be rusticated—isn’t that the word?—by his college and left to do his own explaining at home?’
‘Rusticated for a time, yes. But scarcely sent down for good. In such circumstances I’d expect any decent Head of a college to send a parent some word of explanation and regret.’ Arthur frowned. ‘Unless, of course, he took the view that, after he has come of age, a young man is entitled to keep his misdemeanours to himself, if he wants to. There might be something in that.’ He paused. Even when in great distress, he had a scholar’s impulse to get things straight. ‘But some word of regret, surely! In any case, a school is quite different.’
‘I rather agree. There will turn out to have been a hitch in communication, I imagine. But you needn’t wait for something to arrive, Arthur. You have a perfect right to ring up Robin’s headmaster and ask for an explanation now.’
‘I suppose I have. Yes, of course I have.’ Arthur made a movement towards his desk, on which the telephone stood. Then he hesitated. ‘Wouldn’t that rather be going behind Robin’s back?’ he asked. ‘Better have a word with him first.’
It wasn’t easy for me to find a reply. Arthur’s imagination of disaster was at work, and this evasive impulse was the result. For the moment, at least, he was incapable of reaching out firmly for the truth of the matter. He would rather plunge into harassed conjecture.
‘Those damned public schools!’ he burst out. ‘They’re crazy places. Holding on to boys until they have become vigorous young adults, and confining them for months on end under conditions of complete sexual segregation. It’s criminal – and I’m a plain accomplice. Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t I send Robin to a decent day school, such as was good enough for you and me?’
‘Because of the assumptions of the people among whom you live,’ I said. ‘You didn’t want to be singular, or seem to put Robin at a disadvantage as compared with your colleagues’ sons. But aren’t you rather rushing to conclusions? I know little about public schools – and although you know a lot more, it’s still at second hand. We ought neither of us to fall for seeing them in a lurid light.’
‘I’m not doing that, at all. But we may as well face the straight probability that—’ Arthur broke off. ‘Good heavens!’ he said. ‘I’ve just remembered. The boy’s in the middle of his examinations. His G.C.E’s.’
I don’t think I could be charged with a facile sense of humour. Nevertheless this new and sudden apprehension on Arthur’s part did strike me as being, if in a macabre way, rather funny. The letters G.C.E. have already cropped up in my narrative; as all English parents come to now, they stand for General Certificate of Education. The various grades of examination comprehended within this are administered by public bodies external to the schools themselves, and they have come more and more to represent times of portentous significance in every secondary schoolchild’s career. Oxford, I imagine, was about the last place in the kingdom to accept this estimate of them. But the thing had happened. Here was Arthur Aylwin diverted, it seemed, from the contemplation of some conjectural moral abyss to purely scholastic dismay. Robin’s misdemeanour, whatever its nature, had cut short the boy’s assault upon these particular heights of learning.
‘To kick him out in the middle of that!’ Arthur went on. ‘It does seem pretty stiff.’
I was inclined to agree, and I was drawn to speculation more on Robin’s headmaster – of whom I knew nothing – than on Robin himself. The slip-up by which a disgraced boy had come home unheralded was, I realised on reflection, a serious one. Had Robin happened to arrive at a Greyswood that was untenanted, and while in a disturbed state of mind, it was impossible to say that some really evil consequence mightn’t have ensued. The proper course would have been to require his father to remove him from the school, so that an opportunity might have been given to fetch him and accompany him home. The man who could make a blunder like this might be a blunderer in a larger way.
‘It mayn’t have been only Robin,’ Arthur said. ‘Indeed, a couple of boys detected in a moral offence—’
‘My dear Arthur!’
‘That’s their silly sort of expression for it, isn’t it? A couple of boys are likely to be let off with a fright. But when you get some sort of coterie behaviour of that sort, you see, a headmaster is prone to panic, decide that the foundations of the whole place are rocking, and make a fool of himself by taking what he thinks of as fearless action. Three or four Robins may have tumbled into their respective homes this afternoon.’
These struck me as tolerably acute remarks. I judged it all the more important, therefore, to combat a false premise upon which I believed them to be based.
‘Arthur,’ I said, ‘you’re getting a rapid idée fixe about this. You’re determined to horrify yourself with the notion that Robin has been misconducting himself with other boys—’
‘Nothing of the sort! I mean, I’m not horrified in the least. Do you take me for a parson? Given those unnatural conditions, a certain amount of adolescent nonsense and nastiness like that is as near innocence as makes no matter. It’s blowing it up into unspeakable vice that’s wicked. I’m entirely behind Robin in this.’
For a moment I looked at Arthur in surprise. I had almost forgotten that he owned at times a quite notable power of self-deception. He was himself ‘blowing up’ or inflating whatever was the unfortunate truth of the affair. It had almost instantaneously assumed in his mind dimensions whereby Robin had failed him staggeringly. But if this was Arthur’s persuasion it was at the same time a persuasion that was intolerable to him. So he was discovering that it was he who had failed Robin – presumably by sending him to a perfectly well-reputed public school. This sudden and unwholesome muddle, as I conceived it, it was my duty to cope with as I could.
‘You’re in for a disappointment,’ I said.
‘A disappointment?’ Arthur frowned at me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This idea of standing behind Robin. That particular Robin just isn’t there to stand behind. He doesn’t exist. He may have existed in a sporadic and unconvinced way when he was a good deal younger. But now he exists only in your imagination – and even there he sprang up only in the last half-hour.’
‘You mean I have a dirty mind?’ With a gesture of helplessness, Arthur flung himself into a chair. ‘But what do you know about it, anyway?’
‘Robin’s no stranger to me, and I’ve been dealing with boys of his age and younger all my life. Aren’t there things you know intuitively about undergraduates? Allow me something of the sort on my own pitch.’ I paused. ‘But don’t get me wrong, Arthur. I’m not trying to hand Robin out any comprehensive testimonial of good character. For all I know, his expulsion has been thoroughly well-deserved – although it’s my guess that it has been too severe. But I’m not suggesting there’s likely to have been a really gross miscarriage of justice. Robin’s manner isn’t that of a boy with a burning sense of anything of that kind. Not that you shouldn’t make sure.’
‘Make sure?’
‘I mean that it’s your duty to probe the matter. But my immediate point is simply this: the trouble isn’t what you are supposing it to be.’
‘Not a sex-business at all?’ It would have been impossible to say whether Arthur envisaged this possibility with relief or enhanced dismay. ‘Is that what you say?’
‘I’m saying absolutely no more than I’ve said.’
‘Robin may have been led into something he has no active instinct for.’
‘It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. Why not have him in again, and ask him what it’s all about? He may have calmed down by now.’
‘I’ll go up.’ Arthur got to his feet, and moved slowly across the room. ‘Wait for me, Frank,’ he said, as he went out.
I had, of course, no other intention than that of waiting. Arthur had left the door of his study ajar, and as a consequence I could presently distinguish him tapping on Robin’s door upstairs. Then he knocked more loudly, and I could hear him speaking, and apparently urging that he be let in. He seemed to get no reply, and I heard him speak again – this time on a note of anxiety or alarm.
Because I felt something uncomfortable and displeasing in this situation, I got up and closed the door. I had hardly returned to my chair when it opened again and Julian Aylwin entered the room.
At this time Julian was, I suppose, eleven or twelve: a pale, slim boy with a high forehead and severe grey eyes. He took after his mother; indeed he was uncommonly like more than one of the miniature portraits which hung on either side of her drawing-room chimney-piece. He was still a day boy at an Oxford private school, and there was some hope that he would win a scholarship to Eton. I had no feeling of knowing Julian well; indeed I’d have named him as being, unlike Robin, a type of boy largely alien to my experience. He wasn’t exactly what my own relations would have called an old-fashioned child, because there was nothing timid or withdrawn about him. He didn’t care for games, but he played them with cold precision.
He was imperturbable, his mother had told me, through all the common troubles of a schoolboy’s life. It was only in certain fiercely competitive situations that his composure would break down – as when, for example, a new rival had successfully declared himself in some such field as the command of Greek irregular verbs. On these occasions, Julian would come home as pale as death.
No strain was visible now. Julian said ‘Oh, hullo!’ with an air making this casual greeting positively ceremonious, and he at once added: ‘I suppose you know that Robin has turned up?’
‘Yes, indeed. I’ve seen him.’
‘He’s in a tantrum, I’m afraid.’
‘Surely your brother’s rather old for that?’
‘Of course he is. But, you see, it’s only a mock-tantrum.’ Julian frowned, as if considering that this expression needed clarifying. ‘Robin has got into some far from childish trouble, I suppose, and is trying to persuade himself that it is childish; that he’s been smacked for raiding the jam cupboard, say, and is entitled to begin kicking the nursery door. Do you happen to have seen The Times, sir?’
‘It’s there on the window seat.’
‘Thank you. My father lets me have it at this hour.’ Julian walked to the window and picked up the newspaper with the gravity of an old gentleman in a club. ‘It won’t last, fortunately. Robin does have some dignity. I’m not sure if he ought to be called grown-up. At least there are directions in which he has developed what are called adult tastes. Would you like me to switch on the television, sir? It’s the test match.’
‘No thank you, Julian – not at present.’
‘I thought it might interest you. It’s supposed to be an important stage in the game. The evening’s last few overs may be critical.’ Julian offered this information with polite indifference. He would make similar conversation at school, I imagined, to junior masters of athletic inclinations and simple mind. ‘Shall you be dining in college?’ he asked.
‘Your father and I have been intending to.’
‘It makes no difference here.’ Julian said this with sudden entirely juvenile satisfaction. ‘A lot of the fellows say that when their father dines in college it means poached eggs at home. Not very civilised, would you say?’
‘I can imagine that a mother may sometimes find it convenient. And there’s much to be said for a poached egg.’
‘There’s a little more to be said for two.’ If Julian offered this as a witticism he did so with perfect gravity. ‘I hope Robin’s return won’t upset the place,’ he went on. ‘It’s impossible to get any work done in the middle of emotional orgies. How lucky that Mummy doesn’t flap.’
There seemed to be an implicit judgement on Julian’s father in this, so I thought it best not pursued. The conversation, however, had to be continued somehow, since Julian seemed to feel that, having come upon me deserted, it would be uncivil in him to withdraw.
‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that Robin has been enjoying school recently?’
‘I hope he’s not such an oaf as that.’ Julian said this without any appearance of attempting a smart thing. Then he looked at me with swift interest. ‘But why should you ask? Has Robin run away?’
‘I don’t think so. In fact I’m afraid not. But I do occasionally feel that some of my own pupils get a bit bored by the time they are eighteen.’
‘One can get bored a good many years sooner than that.’ Julian was regarding me with faint amusement. I realised that he had a very fair understanding of his own precocity and of the effect it created. ‘I myself find it difficult to imagine another seven years of sitting on hard benches and staring at blackboards. And then, you know, there’s all this business of adolescence. They say it comes earlier now than it used to – partly because everybody gets more poached eggs. Both with boys and girls. There’s some word for it.’
‘Maturition?’ I suggested.
‘Thank you.’ Julian seemed to make a mental note of this accession to his vocabulary. ‘So people get impatient earlier. Of discipline, I mean, and all that sort of thing.’
‘That is certainly true.’
‘It’s thought not to be a good thing – the impatience, I mean. They say one should be very well educated before being allowed to throw one’s weight about. But it seems to me that if one is going to throw one’s weight about, then education is only going to make one a greater menace. Now you are laughing at me.’
‘Nothing of the sort, Julian.’ I was startled at being suddenly indicted of this rudeness. ‘But why shouldn’t I get a little amused? You do.’
“That’s fair.’ Unexpectedly and rather attractively, this severe child broke into laughter himself. ‘Of course what all schoolmasters say—’ He stopped in confusion.
‘My dear Julian, I don’t at all mind your telling me what all schoolmasters say.’
‘They say – at least the public school ones do – that they cope by giving the older boys a lot of power and responsibility. Do you do that in your sort of school?’
‘To some extent, yes. But there are difficulties in a day school. The senior boys take to it – partly because everybody likes power, and partly for snobbish reasons. But the parents often resent a prefectorial system, particularly when it comes to straight discipline.’
‘Beating people?’
‘That, among other things.’
‘I don’t know that they’re wrong. Your boys’ parents, I mean. Robin’s a prefect now. He put in a lot of time last holidays impressing me with the awful powers he wielded. They didn’t seem to me to be doing him any good. He was kidding himself in claiming that there was anything impressive about it. Do you know what I think? When Robin goes into Oxford as a gilded undergraduate-to-be, he’s really envying the boys out of the motor works, with their awful long hair and their girls and their spending-money.’
‘Julian, dear, will you please go and tell Mrs Clarke we shall be three for dinner?’
Mary Aylwin, entering the study, interrupted my talk with her sagacious younger son. Mary appeared as composed as Julian did, but in her case, I sensed at once that an effort of the will was involved. She knew what had happened.
‘Mary,’ I said, as soon as the boy had disappeared, ‘I’m so sorry about this. It seems a wretched business. But it mayn’t be so bad as Arthur imagines.’
‘Indeed it may not.’ Mary managed a tranquil smile. ‘Many things are not, praise the Lord! Has Julian been offering you his views?’
‘Yes. And perhaps I oughtn’t to have received them. But—do you know?—I think there’s a certain comfort in Julian’s manner of taking things. In ten years time, he’ll be a young man of firm character.’
‘I suppose so. Indeed, he’s that already, in a way. But it’s not because he’s insensitive. I sometimes think there’s more at risk in him than there is in Robin.’ Mary straightened some papers on her husband’s desk. Moving over to a table by the window, she gave a swift touch or two to a bowl of flowers. It was very seldom that she made a remark of this kind. ‘And now,’ she went on, turning back to face me, ‘you and Arthur had better be off.’
‘But do you think we should? It seems rather deserting—’
‘It’s nothing of the sort, Frank. When I first came to live in Oxford, I thought High Tables and common rooms and dining clubs and all the rest of it so many deplorable relics of a vanished celibate society. Now I’m inclined to see them as among the blessed alleviations of family life.’ Mary returned to the open door, and called through it. ‘Arthur, I think it’s time you were getting out the car.’
This brought Arthur into the room again. He didn’t look any better than when he had left it.
‘But, Mary,’ he said, ‘Robin won’t come out! He won’t even answer!’
‘He’ll answer the dinner-bell. You can be quite sure of that. He may even be reasonably communicative. Now, have you got your gown?’
‘You ought to know I don’t need a gown in the tenth week. We’ve stopped dining in Hall.’ This assertion of some small mystique of Oxford life perceptibly braced Arthur. It amused me to be able to see that Mary had placed it deliberately in his way. But then another thought struck him. ‘But, Mary, if Frank will excuse me, I don’t think I ought really to go. The school has behaved very badly – but it’s possible its damned headmaster may have the decency to ring up later this evening. So perhaps—’ He hesitated. ‘It’s hardly fair that you should have to—’
‘Arthur, I shall be quite ready to talk to him – and if he doesn’t want to talk to me he will hear something that surprises him.’
‘But surely—’
At this point I slipped quietly from the study, and went in search of my hat. I had no doubt whatever about where I should have dinner that evening.