I had spent eight months in America, most of them teaching on an exchange basis at a preparatory school in Vermont. Not that there had been any individual exchange involved. Nobody had come from Vermont to Helmingham, since my job had been taken over by somebody on the spot: a retired colleague who was delighted to get into harness again. I had been under an ‘exchange’ system only as having been one of a group scattered around the United States, and roughly equivalent to a group of Americans scattered about England for something like the same period of time. I may say I had been rather surprised that Helmingham let me go so easily, since long leave is generally not thought to be consistent with the responsibilities of a housemaster. But our Head had very handsomely backed the proposal from the start. All seemed to have gone well, and I had no vain disposition to suppose that any of my boys had suffered from the interlude. I had enjoyed my travels, and when I did get back to Helmingham just before the beginning of a new term it was contentedly enough. I didn’t even quail when, upon re-entering my study for the first time, I saw a pile of letters waiting for me on the desk.
But then there was a knock on the door I had barely closed behind me. I called out Avanti! – not as expecting some intending Italian parent about to declare himself, but because schoolmasters do tend to institutionalise that sort of small joke, although only of course with their pupils. And I somehow knew that this was one of them: an early arrival by a clear day before the beginning of term. There are boys – destined to turn out sane and blameless citizens – who are so besotted by the place that they occasionally behave in this tiresome way. But I’d not have expected it of Robin Hayes. And it was Robin Hayes who now came into the room.
‘Hallo, Robin! Stout of you to clock in early like this.’
It was odd how, during those American months, I had let the affairs of the House drop clean out of mind. Now I had remembered just in time that Hayes was behaving quite properly in arriving early and seeking to confer with me. He was a good all-round boy who had taken his Oxbridge hurdle early and gained a place at a decent college. With this settled, he had elected to return to school and receive due promotion to the position of Head of the House, thereby helping me through what he was pleased to believe would prove rather a sticky term.
So much I had gathered from a brief letter – not much more than a note – which I had received from the Head Master some weeks before. As I read it I could almost hear Hayes explaining his virtuous intention to the small group of dons interviewing him in Oxford. A minority of them would indulgently approve; the majority, while keeping mum, would believe the boy would do better filling petrol-tanks in the forecourt of a garage, or otherwise seeing something of the Real World before settling down amid the Dreaming Spires.
‘Can I speak to you, sir?’
‘Of course you can. Sit down.’ I think because obscurely alerted, I said this in a no-fuss way. I even reached for a pipe from the pipe-rack which hangs on the wall beneath a yellowing group-photograph of boys ranged around one of my predecessors some time before the First World War. One hesitates, during one’s mere ten or fifteen years’ tenure as a housemaster, to take liberties even with gruesome objects of that sort.
‘I don’t think it’s going to be too bad,’ I said. ‘This term, I mean.’
But I could see already there was something wrong. Robin Hayes was an agreeable lad to have in the front row of a form, being alert and cheerful, and owning a clear complexion and a straight glance. But now he looked strained and almost ill. I braced myself for the term’s first crisis, small or moderately large, to be decanted on me.
‘I can see you haven’t heard, sir. It’s my father. They’ve put him in prison. Two months ago. Just at the start of the holidays.’
There had perhaps been the ghost of a reproach at the end of Hayes’s speech, and a second’s silence had served to make it almost audible. I regretted my habit when abroad of not regularly seeking out an English newspaper. For a good many weeks this boy had been expecting some sort of supportive letter from me. That seemed obvious. So I must try my best to be supportive now, and to make it clear that my attitude would also be the attitude of the entire reassembled House.
‘Robin,’ I said, ‘I’m deeply sorry. What has it all been about?’
‘I almost can’t bear to tell you.’
‘Whatever it is, I’m afraid you’ll have to bear a good deal more than a frank and reasonable talk with your housemaster.’
‘Yes, of course.’ For a moment the boy eyed me curiously askance. ‘Facing up. Squaring shoulders. All that.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You can’t have heard a word,’ he said. ‘It’s having been so petty and squalid that’s so frightful. My father hasn’t murdered the Dean’s wife, or been caught seducing the Bishop’s boot-boy. It has just been his fingers in the cathedral till.’
‘Embezzlement?’
‘Yes. And probably, among other things, to pay my bills at this school for the sons of gentlemen. What a laugh!’
‘Robin, one of the difficulties will be not dramatising things. Managing to think twice before producing the hard sardonic quip.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
It occurs to me now that this was almost the last private occasion upon which Robin Hayes was to ‘sir’ me. ‘Sir’ from a senior boy to a master can be a stiffly distancing syllable – or so I had sometimes judged it in the past. So I don’t suppose I minded young Hayes dropping it. His family situation was no doubt accelerating the maturing process normally operative at eighteen. Soon, whether warped or not by this sudden disaster, Hayes would be grown up.
But I wasn’t at the moment making a mental note of that sort. I was recalling whatever I knew about the Hayes family. Hayes’s father was not, as the boy’s words might have suggested, himself a parson. But he was the leading solicitor in a cathedral city, and probably looked after the Chapter’s business affairs. So his misdeed, whatever had been its scale, could virtually be viewed as a pilfering from the alms box. I could hear some decently saddened judge feeling constrained to make the point as he handed out his sentence. Hayes’s mother, I happened to know, was a magistrate of the kind that gives quite a lot of time to sitting on the bench. There must have been accounts of all this in the newspapers I hadn’t seen.
‘You’ve met my parents,’ Hayes was saying. ‘When I first came here as a brat, and several times since. They sometimes said I was lucky to have you as a housemaster.’ The boy stopped short on this, as if he’d spoken out of turn. I saw what he was thinking. His father was no longer entitled to be put on record as approving of me.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I remember them both very well.’ For a moment I was at a loss – which is why an odd impulse of curiosity prompted my next question. ‘What do they make your father – I mean how is your father’s time occupied in prison?’
‘He works in the garden. It’s what they call an open prison. That’s something of a contradiction in terms, isn’t it?’
‘It is, indeed.’ The point, I felt, was a proper one for a well-educated boy to make.
‘There are several other men, but it seems my father is the directing intelligence. And a first exhibit of his has just won a prize at a local flower-show.’
I’d have been obtuse not to feel something uncomfortable about this. It opened up the whole question of how the boy now regarded his father. So I went off on another tack.
‘Had your mother known all the time . . .?’ Too late again, I caught myself up. ‘Has it been a great shock to your mother?’ I emended lamely – and told myself I must do better than this.
‘My mother’s—well, showing the flag. She has the carriage, of course.’
‘The carriage?’ Hayes seemed to have made an extraordinary statement; I had a momentary picture of Mrs Hayes as a Victorian lady driven out to take the air.
‘Or the posture or the deportment. I don’t quite know what to call it.’
‘The bearing?’
‘That’s it. Every afternoon she dresses up just a little more than—well, before it happened. She puts on a hat—that sort of thing. Then she walks through the Close and up the length of the High Street. Looking straight ahead and taking care to be acknowledged by nobody. Then she buys something in a shop and walks home again. I don’t know whether it should be called pride. Anyway, it takes guts. And then I see my father.’
‘You see . . .?’ I was bewildered.
‘I see him as he’ll walk, if he ever does, up that beastly street – when they let him out again. A kind of furtive shuffle, as if he’d been inside for far longer that in fact he will be. The judge said something about the disgrace alone being a heavy punishment for one in my father’s position. But then something about betraying an honourable profession. You know the way a chap perched up like that feels he has to talk. As a matter of fact, he has a grandson here.’
‘Not in the House?’ At this point I must have betrayed something like alarm, for an odd look of amusement flitted for a moment over Hayes’s face.
‘No, not as bad as that.’ The tone of this reply hovered, I felt, on the indulgent. ‘The brat’s in School House. David Daviot by name. It’s an additional irony. If that’s the word.’
‘But it isn’t. Eironeia in Greek regularly carries a connotation of ignorance, whether actual or affected.’
There was a longer silence this time. Not unreasonably, Hayes seemed disinclined to say anything further until I had produced something more relevant than pedagogy. I wondered whether he had made a fairly long journey simply to tell me face to face that because of what had happened he was thinking better of his plan to return for a term or a couple of terms as Head of House. It was a problem on which I found myself unready to make a pronouncement off the cuff. I didn’t myself want to lose the lad. But that was irrelevant to the decision he had to make. Money, it occurred to me, might be a consideration in his mind. I didn’t know whether his term’s fees had, as was the general rule, been paid in advance. If so, and if Hayes now withdrew, the school bursar would in the circumstances certainly send the money back. But to whose benefit, heaven knew. Perhaps to the disgraced Mr Hayes in his penal garden. Or perhaps to the defrauded Cathedral Chapter. There was a headache even here.
Meanwhile something positive had to be said, and it would be rash to proceed as with an open mind, exploring pros and cons. To do so might be to give the boy the impression that I was manoeuvring towards ditching him. And to that, it now came to me, I was wholly opposed. Here at school I was by law in loco parentis to Robin Hayes. And the circumstances of the case even pointed at me as being in loco patris in particular. Hayes might of course have grandfathers, uncles, and even big brothers too. I didn’t know. But here was the boy – attractive in himself and to be compassionated in his situation – in my study, and with a new term starting next day. It was clear to me how I ought to go ahead.
‘It’s a sad business,’ I said, ‘and it’s going to take a lot of adjusting to. You’ll come through it all right, Robin, unless I’m much mistaken in you. But it’s a good thing, perhaps, that over the next twelve weeks your hands are going to be pretty full.’
‘I do want to come back, you see.’ Hayes said this cautiously and almost warily – as if afraid, I felt, of betraying too much sentiment about the House and about the school in general. ‘Unless,’ he went on quickly, ‘you think it quite wrong.’
‘I certainly don’t think that.’
‘But there’s my mother obviously, and perhaps I ought to stick to her. Only I have a sister, two years older than I am, who has a secretarial job in the town, and who still lives at home.’ Hayes was now speaking more quickly still. ‘And my mother has always been closer to her than to me. One of those family things. And my mother doesn’t want me to be held up. That’s her expression. She means my plans and career and all that rot to go ahead just as if it hadn’t happened.’ Hayes paused on this, as if something new had come to him. ‘Or because it has happened. The honourable task of redeeming the family name. It sounds a bit corny, I suppose. But I rather stay with the underlying idea. What do you think?’
I thought that the boy was showing up well, but knew that he wouldn’t thank me for telling him so.
‘My first useful thought is that you get down to the job here right away. Do a lot of the reading your future tutors have no doubt recommended to you. But also help me run this unruly menagerie of ours.’
‘That’s just what I don’t want to do: the whole prefectorial business.’ Hayes’s face had flushed suddenly, so that I saw we were coming to what he felt to be the crisis of our discussion. ‘There’s a tiptop Head of House waiting in Macleod. I just want to retire into private life as a respectable Senior. To be unobtrusive. Just an observer.’
‘Absolutely impossible.’ Perhaps for the first time in this difficult interview, I spoke with full conviction – this even although I felt that the boy’s mind was not entirely open to me. I thought of Mrs Hayes in that High Street: very much a person observed rather than an observer. Perhaps the boy felt that in that role he himself could no longer tolerate scrutiny. But whatever was nebulously in his head, I had to come down on it at once. ‘Everybody knows you’re due to be Head of House, Robin. So you’d be contriving a piece of theatrical nonsense, and everybody would be outraged. Morale would disintegrate, and the Head Man would just sail in and expel both of us.’
‘I wouldn’t like that.’ The boy had contrived to raise rather a cautious smile at this perhaps unseasonable extravagance. ‘And I don’t know about morale. But I do know that it’s a wholly moral authority that a Head of House has to be able to exercise. We’re a civilised school, and prefects oughtn’t to go round lamming into brats’ bottoms with a cane to get a perverted sexual gratification out of it.’
‘As they did when I was your age, Robin.’ I had been surprised at the vehemence of that last speech, which hadn’t been pitched at a customary master-and-boy level. I tried to recall whether Robin Hayes had come to us from a prep school in which there were archaic goings-on. But now I had to stick to the main point. ‘Robin, listen. Everybody in the House will come to know about your father, and they’ll all back you up like mad. And it will be the same when you arrive in that Oxford college. Neither what you call your moral authority nor just your general agreeableness will be thought of as in the least impaired by anything that has happened in your home. I sometimes think that the only good point about public-school boys and undergraduates in a college is their astonishing loyalty within the gang. No doubt it applies to skinheads and punk rockers too. And now go away and jump to it. My notice appointing you will be on the board within the next ten minutes, and then you can put one up yourself right away. About stacking tuck-boxes in the locker room, or anything of the sort that you please. And come in to supper with me at about half-past seven, and we’ll talk about other things.’
‘Very well.’ Hayes had got to his feet, and the slightly equivocal smile made another brief appearance. ‘I’ll do just as you tell me. Provisionally, that is.’
‘Yes, of course. You’re not signing indentures, you know.’
‘I think you have a bit of a line on that loyalty biznai yourself. Half-past seven, then.’
And the boy departed. For a moment I wondered about the odd word he’d used – and then I remembered it belonged to Beetle’s slang in Stalky & Co. It was clear that Hayes felt very miserable about his father’s disgrace. That he could manage a momentary and friendly mockery of his housemaster doing his thing seemed not a bad augury for the coming term.
So I was left alone and to my own reflections. It was a situation in which I’d too rarely find myself during the three months ahead. An unmarried housemaster is regarded as lusus naturae, a freak unencumbered by private cares and therefore at all hours available to elucidate whatever professional conundrums turn up. It was true that I had an admirable Matron. Miss Sparrow, a lady of mature age, was adept at momentarily extending the reach of her authority so as to relieve me of much pointless badgering. And Miss Sparrow maintained, from term’s end to term’s end, a sensitive finger on the pulse of the House. I didn’t feel I could properly repeat to her in any detail my talk with Robin Hayes. But what had happened to Robin Hayes’s father was public property. I could discover what, in a general way, she felt was going to be the boy’s position among us. Not that I hadn’t – as must be clear from what I’ve written – made up my mind on how he was likely to be regarded by his schoolfellows. But it would be reassuring to have my own view confirmed by a good judge of boys’ behaviour.
These thoughts – not of a robust order, I can now see – were in my head when suddenly they were displaced by a vivid visual image – almost an eidetic image such as comes to one on the fringes of sleep. What I thus saw was Mrs Hayes, walking up that High Street and wearing that hat. I could have described the cut of her clothes and named the colour of her scarf. She was a handsome woman in early middle-age, big-breasted but with the further bulk of her person well-controlled whether by regimen or by art. And there was no doubt about what her son had called her carriage. She moved as might an Italian woman indulging herself in the passeggiata while conscious that she belongs to the leading family in town. It was an apparition, I realised, compounded of memory equally with imagination: I must have seen Hayes’s mother thus walking between chapel and cricket-field upon some parents’ summer-term occasion.
But what then of Hayes’s father? Was he too going to dredge himself out of memory – but in the broad-arrowed, pyjama-like garments in which convicts were invariably portrayed in the comic papers of my childhood?
Mr Hayes, I found at once, was eidetically a non-starter. I could summon up only a dim image of him that told me nothing – or perhaps only that he was dim. But yet again, he wasn’t quite that to his son. ‘Furtive shuffle’ had been Robin’s proleptic vision of how the wretched man would move when let out of gaol. It had been an uncomfortably evocative phrase. I didn’t think, however, that one could take it as betraying that a settled resentment was now the main component in Hayes’s feeling about his father. I’d rather have not heard it, all the same.
Embezzlement, I next told myself, is surely a pitiful kind of criminal enterprise, particularly when indulged in on a small scale in a county and cathedral town. Sooner or later one is almost sure to be detected – and without having enjoyed much fun meanwhile. The conjectural dimness of Mr Hayes chimed in with that clearly enough. And now another point occurred to me. There was nothing out of the way in a woman of some standing in a community being elevated into acting for it as a magistrate. But there was likely to be something masterful about such a person, all the same. And although Mr Hayes might have been too superior a solicitor to do much or even anything in the way of defending drunks and poachers and careless motorists before a batch of local beaks, there couldn’t be other than some awkwardness in two diverse legal activities cohabiting under one roof.
And finally in this survey of the situation there was something else that Hayes had told me about his set-up at home. ‘One of those family things’ had been his comment on the fact that his mother inclined more to her daughter than to her son. I felt this to contribute to my view – a sketchy view – of the Hayes family as matriarchal in its structure. Ma Hayes – it might vulgarly be put – was boss. Several of my fellow housemasters, to whom the very idea of female dominance was abhorrent, believed that difficult or out-of-step boys often proved to have that sort of background.
Later that morning Miss Sparrow came in for what was our customary beginning-of-term review of the state of affairs on the domestic side of the House. I used to make a little joke with her about what I called our ‘chronic anxieties over the cook’. Strictly speaking, I was as responsible for all that sort of thing as if I had been the sole proprietor of a lodging-house. But here again Miss Sparrow was well equipped to provide – as unobtrusively as might be – a welcome lending hand. Not that she was unobtrusive in a general way. An admiral’s daughter, she would have done excellently in private theatricals as a jolly Jack Tar. There was something about this that made our relationship an easy one. It might readily, I suppose, have been delicate, since she was, after all, a single lady residing with a single gentleman under one roof. I was not wholly without masculine support from time to time, since I occasionally had a junior master quartered with me. But as my companion in the House Miss Sparrow was at present as sole as the Arabian bird – although the comparison is no doubt inept, the phoenix having been of the male sex if of any sex at all.
I gave Miss Sparrow some account of my American experiences, and she responded with a brisk narrative of having accompanied an invalid brother to Crete and Rhodes. It had been a packaged tour, but one of a highly cultivated sort. The brother – not a retired sailor but a retiring Cambridge scholar – had been incensed by the insufficient archaeological learning exhibited by the Greek cicerone of the party, and had judged it necessary to set matters in a clearer light by delivering extemporary lectures of his own. The actual occasions of his doing this could not, I felt, have been other than embarrassing. But Miss Sparrow succeeded in making them sound quite funny.
We then got down to that domestic business, but it didn’t occupy us for long. I could see that during my long absence things had ticked over very well. There were to be a dozen new boys, and they would arrive, some with parents, that afternoon. It was an arrangement giving these small fry the better part of a day to settle in before the confident and noisy established crew arrived. A running tea-party for dads and mums was entailed on me as a result. But here again Miss Sparrow had been at work, producing as a kind of aide-mémoire some jottings on those of the neophytes whose special needs I ought to show myself aware of. When we had run through these I turned to what was much more certainly in my mind.
‘It seems to have been a bad business,’ I said, ‘that of Hayes’s father.’
‘Yes, indeed. Poor old Toad.’
‘Toad?’ I repeated. It seemed an odd way to refer to an unfortunate solicitor.
‘Toad in The Wind in the Willows. He went dippy about motorcars, too.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t catch on to this.’
‘You didn’t read about the trial?’
‘I hadn’t so much as heard of it until the boy came to see me earlier this morning. But what he had to say distressed me very much.’
‘Then I’m sorry to have been flippant about it.’ Miss Sparrow’s sorrow was not reflected in her features, which never bore other than a cheerful cast. ‘You see, it was the Rolls-Royce that took the public fancy, and led to a fairly full reporting of the whole case. Mr Hayes pleaded guilty to the charge, and was allowed by the judge to make a statement from the dock. He said he’d always wanted a Rolls-Royce, and was saving up for one. Unfortunately it had turned out that he was building up the necessary cash at the expense of other people.’
‘Good heavens, Miss Sparrow, the wretched man must have been out of his mind! Wasn’t his sanity inquired into?’
‘Apparently not. The judge said something in passing about “reprehensible eccentricity”, and left it like that. He probably felt that poor Mr Hayes had said the first thing that came into his head – by way of concealing, of course, some authentic reason for his misconduct. My own guess is that he was being blackmailed over something, and that the judge, a Mr Justice Daviot, took a humane view of the affair, and called it a day, so to speak, on the Rolls-Royce story.’
‘It seems to me likely that your guess, my dear lady, will have been shared with a good many other people.’
I didn’t, I ought to say, address Miss Sparrow as ‘my dear lady’ except when I was considerably upset. I may have been reflecting that there was something peculiarly unfortunate in the Hayes affair trailing behind it a suggestion of misdeeds still unrevealed. But I now produced a factual question which I had somehow been unable to put to the imprisoned man’s son.
‘For how long was Hayes sent to gaol?’
‘For two years. I believe that means in practice sixteen months. But only if Mr Hayes behaves in a well-conducted way.’
‘And it means that Robin Hayes will be in his first year at Oxford. The whole thing, Miss Sparrow, is the devil of a mess.’ I paused on this, recalling that Robin Hayes had said nothing to me about the Rolls-Royce, which he probably regarded as an unbearable absurdity. Then I remembered something else. ‘It seems there’s a boy called Daviot in School House. A brat, as they insist on going on calling juniors. A grandson of this judge. Do you happen to have heard of him?’
‘I believe I’ve noticed the name in the school roll. The connection didn’t occur to me. And it seems not likely to add to that devil of a mess.’
Had Miss Sparrow and myself not been fast friends, this echoing of my phrase might have been irritating. As it was, it was merely being hinted to me that we mustn’t make too heavy weather of the Hayes affair. Nevertheless, I instanced a further misgiving.
‘It’s curious,’ I said, ‘how in a public school each house tends so much to keep itself to itself. Wholesome rivalry at a distance, and so on, is the key to our relationships. So I don’t think there will be silly gossip about this unfortunate business throughout the school. Only I wish the Daviot boy were a little more senior than he is. Some of my colleagues moan over the difficulty of having to cope with young men within a system essentially designed for children. My own view is that it is often the younger boys who are irresponsible. They haven’t quite got hold of the spirit of the place.’
Miss Sparrow might well have made fun of this schoolmasterly remark. Instead, she looked serious, and made a thoughtful pause before speaking again.
‘I heard that Robin Hayes had gained a place at Oxford. That makes his time his own for a good many months ahead. Has he had any reason to come back to school?’
‘I have the impression that he planned it out quite long ago. He’d have a shot at Oxford entrance, and if he made it he’d return to lend a hand with the House.’
‘I’ve known of boys doing that from time to time. It’s usually because they want a spell of power before becoming insignificant freshmen at a university. But I’m not sure that anything of the kind quite fits in with my idea of Hayes.’
‘It doesn’t any longer seem to fit in with his own idea of himself either.’ I believe I betrayed some annoyance as I said this. ‘He wanted to return as a private citizen. That makes nonsense of his notion of being my right-hand boy. I had to tell him it wouldn’t do.’
‘No doubt you were entitled to do that.’ When minded to, Miss Sparrow never spared me a hint of criticism. ‘But I continue to find the whole thing puzzling in the light of his present fix. For it is a fix. And I’d suppose it would be his impulse to get away from the old familiar faces, not to dive in among them.’
I felt that there was more force in this contention of our Matron’s than I was altogether willing to acknowledge, and I hesitated to reply with any reference to what Hayes himself had called the loyalty biznai. So I thought of something else.
‘It’s a good point,’ I said. ‘But look at it another way. The boy suffers this terrific shock about his father, and feels that a whole alien world is staring at him in that gossiping cathedral town. But here at Helmingham is a society in which his own efforts have gained him a secure and decent regard. From you and me, Miss Sparrow, as well as from his peers. He has a place here, and he makes for it. In your own phrase, he dives in among us. We mustn’t let him drown.’
Perhaps I meant to say, ‘let him down’, since I am not much given to metaphorical expression. But Miss Sparrow seemed to judge that I had designed to close our conference on a note of muted drama. So she went about her business as I did about mine.
For a minute or two I wasn’t quite sure what my business was. At any time the beginning of a new term brings a housemaster innumerable chores, and this increases – at least the sense of it increases – if one has had a spell away from the school. There was that pile of letters. But then it occurred to me that the proper thing would be to make a species of courtesy call on the Head Master. I had been away for quite a long time. So I crossed the cricket field to John Stafford’s house.
Stafford had a ‘come in at any time’ rule with members of the staff. He worked with his study door open, and one either walked in with a token knock or halted at any sound of voices and hung about or went away. On this occasion he was disengaged, and he stood up at once and shook hands.
‘Delighted to see you back, Syson,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re feeling refreshed.’ The tone of this was correct, but I didn’t quite like the choice of words. Conversing with Stafford, one frequently didn’t know whether he had been inadvertently tactless or deliberately astringent. And here there seemed to be an intimation that I had been judged to leave Helmingham in a jaded and probably rather useless state. ‘You must be particularly glad to find,’ Stafford went on, ‘that things have been going unusually well on the classical side.’
Spoken thus to the head of the school’s Classics department, these words were infelicitous, to say the least. But Stafford was being hospitable the while, having moved over to a side table on which stood half a dozen wine glasses and a single decanter. The idea was, I think, to suggest to parents that none of us at Helmingham was of a heavily bibulous habit.
‘A glass of sherry, Syson?’ he asked.
I accepted sherry. Stafford always addressed us by our surnames. And we always replied, even upon the most informal occasions, with ‘Head Master’. I approved of this. Between adults, one ought not to address as ‘Rupert’ or ‘Roger’ a man who cannot reply comfortably with ‘Timothy’ or whatever it may be. And to have the junior masters saying ‘John’ to Stafford would have been inappropriate.
‘Thank you for your note about Hayes,’ I said. It was an index of how keenly I felt for my boy’s position that I started in with this at once, and before there was any chance of small talk about my travels.
‘Hayes?’ For a moment Stafford appeared to be at sea, as if effort were required to disentangle this particular boy from amid the multiplicity of his headmasterly concerns.
I was annoyed by this, as I judged it, affectation – which accounts for what I next said.
‘It was perhaps, Head Master, a little on the uninformative side.’
‘My dear Syson, I’m extremely sorry. Deeply sorry.’ Stafford was inclined to be lavish with his purely formal expressions of contrition. ‘I hesitated to burden you with the boy’s troubles until you were back at school. And I corresponded, I hope adequately, with his mother. No doubt she has written to you as well.’
‘No doubt. The letters that came too late to forward to me are waiting for me in my study now.’
‘I can see that Mrs Hayes is worried about the money – both in relation to us and to Oxford later on. Of course the boy has been rather brisk about Oxford under their present early-place system. I’d have preferred him to wait a bit and go after at least a minor award. He’s very fair exhibitioner standard, I’d say – and as the family fortunes have turned out the money would probably be useful. Not that in cash terms open scholarships and exhibitions are of much account nowadays, as you know.’
‘Certainly I do. And I fear the Hayeses’ finances may just be at a tricky level for getting any decent grant from the public purse. I suppose, Head Master, we might find something ourselves to help the boy through.’
‘My dear Syson, anything of the kind that you proposed would certainly be approved at once. Of course, inquiries would have to be made. It’s conceivable that there are affluent relations not too far away.’
‘As a solicitor the lad’s father is presumably a gonner for good.’
‘I fear so. The Law Society tries to be lenient when such disasters come along. When a man loses first his liberty and then his job there is an uncomfortable sense of double penalty about the thing. But you can’t get round embezzlement. The poor devil will be struck off for keeps. Another glass?’
I declined this invitation, but took it as a hint that enough had now been said about Robin Hayes and his misfortune. At the same time I remembered that two or three men whom I had met in America had charged me with messages of regard to John Stafford. That species of second-hand cordiality more often than not slips my mind, but I was glad to be explicit about it on the present occasion. It would serve to wind up this not particularly necessary call on the Head Man. (It was thus that we referred to John Stafford among ourselves and occasionally to the older boys.)
So I delivered the messages I had been charged with, and Stafford with his customary conventional politeness offered an appreciative word or two about each of the senders. I then got up to take my leave. But Robin Hayes still ran in my head, and I paused at the door to say another word about him.
‘There’s one further thing about young Hayes, Head Master. It’s something he told me – although without seeming to be at all concerned. It seems that the judge who tried his father has a grandson now in School House.’
‘Ah, yes – a junior boy called Daviot. His parents are dead, and he is his grandfather’s ward. Both boys were at Birnam Wood.’
‘Birnam Wood?’ For a moment I really thought that I had been offered some arcane reference to Macbeth. Then I remembered that this was the sufficiently unlikely name of quite a well-known prep school. Robin Hayes’s prep school, in fact.
‘Both Hayes and Daviot?’ I asked. ‘They can’t have been contemporaries there.’
‘Obviously not. But they did overlap. Hayes was in his last year there when this Daviot child was in his first.’
At this moment the Head Master’s telephone rang, and he turned to the instrument with a resigned gesture to me which concluded our interview in a gracefully informal manner. So I walked back to the House. As I did so, I tried to recall just what Robin Hayes had told me about David Daviot. He had certainly said nothing about a prep school. But his attitude to the judge’s grandson had been fairly casual, and there was no reason why he should have said more than he did. Probably what he had not very accurately called an irony did irk him more than he cared to acknowledge, and he had wanted to say nothing more about it.
As I returned to the House I was made aware of various evidences that the new term was now advancing upon us rapidly. From several vans ‘luggage in advance’ was being distributed higgledy-piggledy in front of one house or another – and with an uncertain accuracy which was occasioning the customary rude exchanges between the railway people and the school porters. Refrigerated vehicles were delivering in a more orderly fashion a routine consignment of the endless provisioning required for some six hundred hungry (and often unreasonably fastidious) boys. On the playing-fields several men perched on ladders were giving goal-posts a belated lick of paint.
I made no pause to inspect any of these activities, being curious to discover whether Robin Hayes’s mother had indeed written to me, and if so to what effect. I was habituated to going rapidly through a fairly substantial batch of mail, since boarding-houses at an English public school seldom run to a secretary, and had certainly never done so in my own case. So I separated out the envelopes clearly suggesting private correspondence. The third of these, when opened, proved indeed to be from Mrs Hayes.
Dear Mr Syson,
You will by now have heard of my husband’s misguided conduct. My daughter and son must not be affected by it in any way. My husband’s absence will be of less than two years’ duration. This is a common enough period of separation within families: for example, when a father or son is on a tour of duty overseas. I do not propose therefore that my children visit their father in his present situation. But I myself have done so, and may do so again if family business requires it. I found him much (and I judge needlessly) concerned about Robin’s immediate future. I myself see no reason why, when Robin goes on to Oxford, he should not read Law: it is what I have intended from the first as a preliminary to his being called to the bar. Will you be so kind as yourself to visit my husband, and set the matter in a proper light? You simply write to the governor of Hutton Green, who will arrange a time.
Yours sincerely,
Editha Hayes
My first response on reading this letter was one of displeasure before its deplorable tone. Merely regarded as an effort at prose composition, it conveyed a curiously bleak effect. But neither with that, I saw at once, nor with the specific concluding infelicity of her manner of laying an injunction upon me, had I any concern. The woman’s husband was in prison; if she had been thrown off balance there was nothing surprising in the fact; it would be wrong in me to stand on my dignity and turn her proposal down. It could not but be to the advantage of her son that I should discuss his affairs with his father, whether in prison or out of it. So I wrote a reply at once.
Dear Mrs Hayes,
Thank you for your letter. I had a talk with Robin this morning, immediately after his return to school. He is now Head of House: my head prefect, that is to say, and as a consequence a school prefect as well. I am very pleased he has returned to us.
I will make at once the arrangement you suggest for a meeting with Mr Hayes. Here I would remark only, and as a generally held academic opinion, that reading Law at Oxford is not in all cases the best preparation for entering upon a barrister’s career.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Syson
Having sent off my letter, I went to the telephone and drummed up an unattached junior colleague I had noticed about the place to come to an evening meal with me. Robin Hayes, I guessed, would be relieved that he wasn’t going to have an immediate further tête-à-tête with his housemaster.