That is the end of my story.
A few days later the school term ended, the holidays began, and I left the town for six weeks. When I returned the Second World War had broken out.
The awkwardness about finishing a novel lies in thinking the fact that though the story is ended the characters are still alive. I have chosen to end my story at this incident, because it was the last I saw of Myrtle; because the war broke out and we were all dispersed. But we all went on living. It seems to me that if you have been sufficiently interested to read as far as this you can hardly help wondering what we did after the end of the story.
I can tell you what we did. I could call a roll, indicating the fate that befell each of us. If only print could speak, you would hear my voice ring out sonorously:
Myrtle:married,
Myrtle’s dress-maker: married,
Tom: married,
Steve: married,
Robert: married,
Haxby: married,
The other Crow: married,
My landlady: married,
Frank: married,
Benny: married,
Fred: married,
Trevor: married – twice!
This is all very well. It will doubtless be of interest to the race, but not, I fear, to the individual reader. So I will stop playing and get down to business. I will push on with my story just a little way, and then sum up what happened to each of the main characters.
I completed the term at school without being asked to resign. I thought I was doing rather well. Bolshaw told me my retention was dependent on his patronage. I thought the headmaster had forgotten his threatening letter to me in his agitation over not being able to trace the teaspoons. Bolshaw ceased his practice of denigrating my character in the explosion of rage he experienced when he heard Simms was coming back.
The boys of the senior sixth form left, and in the fresh term I felt lost without them. However it was not very long before I was called up for military service, and I shook the dust of the school off my shoes for ever.
Shortly after leaving for ever I had to go back for some books, and I heard that Simms had died suddenly.
‘Of course it was a happy release,’ Bolshaw said, in what I thought was a very ambiguous tone. He blew through his whiskers and stared at me. Certainly it had been a happy release for Bolshaw. ‘I’m glad to say the headmaster has listened to reason over the reorganization. He asked me to take over both jobs. I’m now senior science master and senior physics master. It will mean I shall have less time for teaching.’ He gave me a grandiose smile, in which his moustache drew back from his tusks.
I left without calling on the headmaster, and I never saw him again.
My landlady must have had enough of schoolmasters. In my place she took an insurance agent twenty years older than me. Her choice could hardly have been wiser, because he married her and was kind to her dog. On the other hand, her niece has still had nothing like enough of Mr Chinnock, who calls on her at two-thirty every Sunday, like clockwork.
*
The friends of mine who were killed in the war are not any of those who appear in this story. Trevor, Benny, Frank and Fred all escaped.
Trevor dabbled in what he called art until he was called up, when he got into the Intelligence Corps. He remained a sergeant till the end of the war, and then he married the big girl over whom we had had all the fuss. Tom was furious when he heard about it, and proposed that Trevor should start paying back our money. After marrying her, he divorced her and married another big girl.
Frank had a year at Oxford doing science and then he became a radio officer in the Navy. He had a creditable career, he looked very handsome in uniform, and he married a thoroughly nice girl. Somehow he feels he has missed something.
Fred got a job in the corporation electricity department, did his military service, and returned to it. If you happen to be near the clock-tower and go into the electricity department’s showroom, the stocky man with brilliantined hair and a good-natured soppy voice, who is trying to interest you in an immersion heater, is Fred. He has begotten a large family.
Benny worked his way into the Royal Army Medical Corps. After congratulating himself on his apparent safety, he found to his consternation that he could not be commissioned without being a doctor. Towards the end of the war the regulations were changed and he became a 2nd Lieutenant. On the basis of this medical career, he set up in a room above one of the shops in the marketplace as a radiologist. He now has three rooms, an assistant, a nurse, a lot of ponderable equipment and the minimum qualifications. He has offered to X-ray me at any time free of charge.
So much for the boys.
And now we come to Steve. It will be no surprise to you that Steve did not free himself from his patron. They continued to enjoy scenes of violent emotion both with and without motor cars. Steve’s French accent was improved by a holiday in France, and Tom did not go to America.
On the other hand, in the following year, the war removed Tom from the town, and his devoted interest in his protégé seemed inexplicably to wane. Steve found his freedom returning at an embarrassing pace; and soon there was literally nothing to stop him becoming as ordinary as he pleased. When he was called up Steve finally showed his independence: he volunteered to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force.
Steve actually reached the stage of flying an aeroplane – he flew it with skill, but he was unable to land it. With all his gifts, Steve had been born without the knack of bringing an aeroplane down intact. Everybody recognized it; some of us, including Steve, with relief. The Air Force tried to make him a navigator, but Steve’s arithmetic let him down. They tried to make him a wireless operator and he mysteriously developed sporadic bouts of deafness. Steve was unglamorously kept to the ground. However, one thing Steve had mastered from life with his patron was the art of bearing up. Indeed he must have had a talent for it. His gesture had failed, but he was more than content from merely having made it. He bore up remarkably well. He soon began to look round.
What Steve saw was the daughter of the junior partner in his old firm of accountants. She was an attractive, strong-minded girl, and she had fallen in love with Steve. Steve wanted to be married: he wanted to be a father. And in the end he accommodated himself to the idea of becoming an accountant. This, too, cost him some suffering, but his fortitude saved him. He was just the sort of man the firm wanted back; a young Air Force officer, clever, charming, well-bred, conventional and right-minded. He married the girl.
And there in the town Steve remains. He is unostentatiously successful as an accountant. He and his wife live in style. He is very proud of his children. As the years pass he deplores other people’s divagations with decreasing self-consciousness. Steve has become respectable.
There is something peculiarly edifying about Steve’s life-history. Steve is now respected by others. I should like to call him a pillar of society. Yes, I will call Steve a pillar of society: it is fitting.
*
I said that Tom did not go to America. That is not true. He did not go to America as a prospective political refugee in August 1939. None of us went. Tom delayed and delayed, and Robert exerted no pressure to make him leave. ‘There’s going to be a war,’ Tom said, first of all because he did not want to go, and then because there was going to be a war.
Before he was due to be called up Tom was offered a job in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He took it, and before long he had become successful in it. He went to work in Headquarters, in London, and was unexpectedly promoted by Lord Beaverbrook. It was reported that he was promoted because the Minister left his brief-case in the lift and Tom chased after him with it. I do not think the report is true.
With the changes of regime in his ministry Tom moved up and down the scale; till finally he quarrelled with one of his superiors and was sent on a mission to Washington. So he went to the U.S.A. after all.
Now you ought to know Tom well enough to answer in one go the simple question: ‘What did Tom do in America?’
Tom became an American.
In America Tom found a limitless field for his bustling bombinations, spiritual, emotional and geographical. Suggestibly he began to speak with an American accent. Rashly he proposed marriage to an American girl, who accepted and made him marry her. He was offered an attractive job if he would take out first papers. The war ended, he stayed on, and there he is.
Some time ago I was in America, and I stayed with Tom and his family. I found his appearance had changed a little: his red hair is still as thick and curly as ever, but his physique is showing signs of portliness. He has not become as portly as he would have become in England, but the signs are there. Otherwise he had not changed.
On my second evening he sent his wife to bed early, brought out a bottle of whisky, and began to talk about old times.
He asked about Steve, who no longer writes to him, and Myrtle, who no longer writes to either of us. Talking of Myrtle threw him into his pleasing philosophical mood. In the intervening years he had learnt more of the secrets of the heart, so he informed me. The thought of Myrtle stirred him.
‘Ah, Myrtle,’ he said, pursing his lips and smiling.
‘Ah, Myrtle,’ I said, myself, and drank some whisky.
‘You made a grave mistake over her, Joe.’
‘What?’
‘Myrtle,’ he said, in a low, authoritative voice, ‘didn’t want passion. She wanted marriage.’
I might have been listening to him in the café.
It all came back to me. The low tone of voice was exactly the same: only the words were exactly the opposite.
Tom smiled with self-satisfaction. You see that he had not changed at all.
At last, Myrtle. Myrtle married Haxby.
During the months I lived in the town after the summer holidays, I saw her only twice by chance in the street. We did not stop to speak to each other. I supposed that she must be hearing scraps of information about me as I was about her. Her bohemian parties were still in full swing, attended by Trevor and Steve. Her rejection of Tom’s proposal of marriage appeared to cause neither of them any embarrassment. I think Myrtle liked him the more for it. Tom went to her parties and told me the news about her.
The first subject of gossip was my resemblance to Svengali. This wilted as a love-match with Haxby came into view. I did not pretend to try and keep up with it. At this point I left the town for good, and they had been married for some time before I heard.
Myrtle became a success in the advertising business. She remained a success. When you see the advertisements for a well-known brand of nylon stockings, sleek, attractive advertisements that at first glance look perfectly innocent and at second perhaps not, you are looking at the work of Myrtle – and she is being paid a lot of money for it.
Myrtle is happy. She looks sad and her voice sounds melancholy. Only Tom’s insight could pierce to the depths of her heart: I would say she was happy. She still looks meek, and she still smiles slyly. When hard-natured businessmen offer her contracts she gives a fluttering downward glance, as much as to say she knows they are only doing it to be nice to her. And often they, poor creatures, grin foolishly in return.
Myself. I knew, as soon as I started telling the life-histories of the others, that I should be left with the embarrassing prospect of telling my own. It is one thing to give away what belongs to somebody else, quite another to part with what belongs to oneself. I think of the string of delights and disasters that have come my way since 1939. And then I think of all the novels I can make out of them – ah, novels, novels, Art, Art, pounds sterling!
My own life-history. The past years suddenly spring up, delightful and disastrous, warm, painful and farcical. I reach for a clean new note-book. I pick up my pen.