I drove over on my mission to Mr Hayes some ten days later. All that my Ordnance Survey map showed me was a Hutton Park, near the middle of which stood a mansion-house named as Hutton Hall. I had no difficulty in locating it. Although in part screened by trees, its general character became apparent at about half a mile’s distance as I reached the crest of a ridge of high ground to the south of it. It was large but architecturally undistinguished, built perhaps for some up-and-coming person in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The building disappeared as I dropped downhill again. Presently I was driving through a straggling and nondescript village without arriving at any glimpse of Mr Hayes’s involuntary residence of Hutton Green. On its further outskirts I passed on my left hand first the church and a comfortable-looking hotel, and then several hundred yards of low stone wall. I supposed that here could only be the boundary of Hutton Park, and was confirmed in this view on coming upon a carriage drive and a lodge: the drive flanked by stone pillars on which hung open gates, and the lodge apparently unoccupied. It was absurd that I was still entirely at sea. But I should certainly have continued to drive on had I not happened to spot, fixed to one of the pillars which was crowned by a prancing and heraldically improbable hippogriff, an unobtrusively conceived metal panel which read:
H.M. PRISON
HUTTON GREEN
Thus finding my search at an end, I backed and then ran up the drive. It went straight through the park between lines of beeches, and over a considerable area on either hand any scattered timber had been removed in the interest of athletic pursuits. To my right there lay a cricket field with its central area, sufficiently broad for three or four pitches, roped off to discourage undesirable out-of-season incursions; to my left was a somewhat undersized soccer ground, surrounded by what appeared to be a well-maintained running track. I concluded that the disgrace of Hutton Hall (for one describes as disgraced a large house fallen upon hard times) must have come about by stages, and that it had quite recently been a boys’ private school before becoming a rural receptacle for the criminal classes.
I believe it was in some confusion of mind that I drew up before the front door. My instructions had been to give my name and ask for the Governor, but I recall that what my inward eye imagined with some vividness was being received by a seedy and depressed menial in threadbare and greasy black, who had declined with the house’s decline from butler to general factotum around the place. Of course the door was opened by a warder. The man was certainly that – being dressed almost, but not quite, like a policeman. It is probably difficult for a normally constituted individual to undergo a first encounter with any species of professional gaoler without at least a small degree of irrational alarm. I managed to state my name and business, but retained little power of detailed observation until I was shown into some kind of waiting-room and left to myself.
What I was first aware of was a faint antiseptic smell, reminiscent of the boys’ part of the House when it has had its thorough clean-through before the beginning of term. It was a small, bare room, with a bench and some uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs. On the walls were three or four group-photographs in which a man in civilian clothes, and with features that seemed curiously familiar to me, sat in the middle of one or another bevy of uniformed men all precisely resembling the warder – the ‘screw’, I suppose he might be called – who had admitted me. This, too, was disquieting. For some reason the thought came to me that the young Shelley (unlike Thomas Gray before him) had thought of Eton as a prison. This idle reflection was barely out of my head when I found myself ushered into the Governor’s presence.
He was a man of about my own age. So much I saw at once.
He had been sitting behind a big and very tidy desk. But from this he jumped up the moment I entered the room.
‘Pog!’ he exclaimed. ‘I was sure it must be you.’
How I came to be called Pog at Harrow I don’t think I ever knew. All ‘Pog’ suggests is ‘pug’, and although not good-looking I certainly bore no resemblance to that particular breed of dog. Nicknames, moreover, were not much in vogue in my time. But ‘Pog’ it was – whereas Owen Marchmont had never been other than ‘Marchmont’ to intimates and mere form-fellows alike. The day on which public-school boys would address one another by Christian name (except on holidays spent together) still lay in the future. I made some reply to Marchmont’s familiar greeting, and for moments we regarded one another with the compunction which attends suddenly recognising before us what happens beneath the unimaginable touch of time. I then said what first came into my head.
‘Why Hutton Green, Marchmont? It’s not on the map as that.’
‘I suppose because Hutton Hall or Hutton Park wouldn’t sound quite right. Suggest elderly gentlefolk in a high-class sunset home. Not that we haven’t got a few of them in residence. Listen.’
The morning was warm; there was an open window beside me; what I heard through it as I obeyed my old schoolfellow’s injunction was a faint hollow click and then a further hollow click which could only proceed from one activity in the world.
‘Croquet?’ I said.
‘Just that. They have quite a lot of free time, and all ages have to be catered for. By the way’ – and Marchmont glanced at me sharply – ‘are you related to this chap you’ve come to visit?’
‘Not remotely.’ I hope I didn’t say this as if repulsing an aspersion. ‘I’m a housemaster at Helmingham, and Hayes has a son with me. Hayes wants a word with me about the boy. Or his wife says he does.’
‘That woman frightens me, Syson. Turned up here as if she was doing the place a favour. Told me she was a magistrate. She gave me to understand – quite by the way – that she might pretty well turn in a report on me to the Home Secretary. I tried to explain how we did our best with people like her husband. It didn’t seem an angle on the affair she was much interested in.’
‘Does Hayes play croquet?’
‘I’d have to ask my Head Warder, who keeps the balls and mallets. But probably not. Hayes works in the gardens, and attends various classes from time to time.’
‘Classes?’
‘No end of them. And of course workshops as well. All tucked away in a warren of hutments behind the house. Elements of Accountancy is the popular thing at the moment. Makes some of them feel they’ll get away with it better next time. And the locksmith’s shop is pretty well frequented too.’
There was a flavour of burlesque about this which made me feel that Owen Marchmont was a man not altogether at one with himself. This thought prompted me to an inquiry which would have been impudent except by a kind of unspoken appeal to the unregarding frankness licensed between schoolfellows.
‘What brought you into this line of country, Marchmont?’
‘Coming out of the army and looking around. And I’d read a bit about the theory and the history of the thing. Penology, that is. I thought something might be done; even that there was a climate of opinion growing up that might help that way. But, once in, one can’t be spectacular. And the basic situation is quite intractable. Who was the chap said something about a robin redbreast in a cage?’
‘Blake, I think. It puts all heaven in a rage.’
‘Right. But I don’t go with the poets much. Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. Bosh. They bloody well do. Even if you gild the iron bars no end. Harrow or a snot-school. There’s never been a boy at either of them who hasn’t had his weeks feeling that he’d swop for a desert island like a shot.’
I was shocked by this, and almost forced into silence. Yet something, I felt, I had to say.
‘I can see,’ I ventured hesitantly, ‘that yours must be a job in which it’s sometimes hard to fight disillusionment. But there must be another side to the picture. There must be occasions when – well, when a touch of the humane and compassionate makes all the difference.’
‘Taking away a man’s liberty is a staggering thing.’ Marchmont seemed scarcely to have heard what I had said. ‘But for thousands of years it has gone on to the enslavement of millions. And every one of them has felt, as the prison doors clanged behind him, that he is a man cast alone among animals. Not necessarily savage animals, as in an arena. Just nasty, smelly, skulking ones.’
‘Yours seems to be rather a special sort of prison, Marchmont. But I suppose you speak from your experience of others as well. What about the old lags who go back to prison again and again? They can’t have that cast-among-animals feeling.’
‘They may feel something as bad. Who was the wench got working on Ulysses’ other ranks?’
‘Circe.’
‘Turned them into swine, but had a line in manufacturing wild animals too. Right? Your old lags may feel they’ve had both treatments: into savage animals first, and then broken in for the circus of Pentonville or the Scrubs.’
I found all this interesting enough, although force rather than clarity seemed to be the main characteristic of Marchmont’s mind. I felt, however, that my mission at Hutton Green was still bodefully before me, and that I’d like to get on with it.
‘At least,’ I said, ‘this unfortunate solicitor has presumably not been turned into a porker. What are the conditions under which I see him? Will one of your men be present?’ As I asked this question I didn’t much concern myself about the answer. What I did feel anxious about was the possibility that the Governor himself would take it into his head to usher me into Hayes’s presence. I saw such a procedure as obscurely embarrassing. But my mind was at once put at rest.
‘One of my chaps listen or peep in? Lord, no! You’re not likely to be passing Hayes a hack-saw or some powerful explosive, are you? The Head Warder will take you along to him, and you’ll find there’s a bell you can ring when you’ve had enough of one another. I hope you can stay to lunch with me?’
I declined this invitation, explaining that over the next couple of months my time would seldom be my own. Although I liked my rediscovered schoolfellow Owen Marchmont, I felt an impulse to get away from Hutton Green as quickly as I conscientiously could.
The Head Warder was an elderly man with a benevolent and sympathising air. I suppose it is by relations that imprisoned persons are most commonly visited, and he probably imagined me to be Mr Hayes’s elder brother. The room into which he showed me was that in which I had waited previously, and it was again empty.
‘He’ll be along in half a minute,’ the Head Warder said soothingly. ‘He’s been in the garden, and probably feels he needs a wash and brush up.’
I had no doubt imagined a prison as a place in which the inmates are marched smartly up and down, or round in circles, by warders shouting ‘left-right, left-right, left-I-say, left-I-say’ in a commanding military manner. But it was clear that Hutton Green was conducted on other principles. I sat down, thanked the Head Warder as he left me, and composed myself to await Mr Hayes’s leisure. I didn’t feel I had much to say to him, and was inclined to doubt whether he really had much to say to me. I was here, I told myself, only because the luckless man’s wife liked pushing people around. Or, for that matter, making them stay put. Her son was eighteen and her daughter was twenty, but she had written as if it were for her to determine – and in the most absolute manner – whether these adults should visit their father in prison or not. I didn’t need myself to be a father to know that, in the present age, any such writ simply doesn’t run. Letters from apologetic parents, confessing their inability to persuade Billy or Bobby to this or that, came to me at the rate of several every term. I was often constrained to dissimulate the embarrassing fact that I myself hadn’t a good deal more influence over Bobby or Billy.
There were footsteps in the corridor. I found myself trying to decide – and then, with an instant shift of impulse, trying precisely not to decide – whether they suggested Robin Hayes’s ‘furtive shuffle’. The door started opening, came to a momentary stop, moved again. Mr Hayes had hesitated on the threshold of the depressing little room, and then summoned up sufficient resolution to enter it. Or so I read that brief pause. He was now before me, and I rose hastily to my feet. I wondered whether to take the initiative in offering to shake hands. It was up to him, I thought, since after a queer fashion he was my host. But with a glimmering of good sense I did make the movement and accomplish the ritual. But now, and just as he had hesitated to face me, did I hesitate to face him. I didn’t want to look him in the eye. But this meant looking at his clothes, and that I didn’t want to do either. At Hutton Green were they put in some distinguishable prison uniform? I didn’t want to know – and the result of this was that I ended up looking at the hand I had just taken. This provided me with one simple fact at least. Mr Hayes worked in those gardens quite a lot.
‘Do sit down,’ Mr Hayes said.
I had expected to converse with Robin Hayes’s father through one of those overlapping armoured glass contraptions which confront one nowadays when one buys a railway ticket or cashes a cheque in a bank. I’d have found anything of the sort difficult. As it was, I judged it wasn’t beyond me at least to make do.
‘I’ve gathered from Mrs Hayes,’ I said, ‘that you’d like to discuss Robin’s affairs, and I’m glad to have the opportunity. I can assure you, for a start, that he’s doing well. His form work is very solid. And, outside that, he’s being thoroughly useful to me as my Head of House.’ I felt I couldn’t say less than this, although in doing so I wasn’t being entirely candid. There had been something elusive about the boy during the first week of term.
Mr Hayes was silent, so that I had to wonder what to say next. The man’s expression, I felt, might afford me a cue, and for the first time I took a straight look at him. There was something meagre in his appearance, and in this he differed from his son, who was robust, if in a fine-boned way. This rendered the more striking the fact that facially there was a strong resemblance between man and boy. Yet what they shared couldn’t be termed expressive in the sense of suggesting any sort of temperamental affinity. I didn’t feel either that Mr Hayes would make a reliable prefect or that his son might not be trustworthy in small financial matters. It was just a physical correspondence, and little was to be gathered from it. But here was Mr Hayes still saying nothing, and all I could do was to add to the commendation of which I had just delivered myself.
‘The boy works hard,’ I said.
‘He pushes hard.’
I didn’t make much of this laconic statement, the tone of which was not laudatory.
‘An unnecessary term, or two unnecessary terms, still at school. At over a thousand pounds a time. Oxford or nothing. And then nagging about that car. Hard as hard.’
It may be imagined that I listened to this, Mr Hayes’s first speech, with astonishment. I recalled his son’s making some light remark about school bills. And I recalled the Rolls-Royce.
‘That car?’ I repeated stupidly. ‘A Rolls-Royce?’
‘A Morgan – the equivalent thing, it seems, among the affluent young. Of course I said Rolls-Royce. I wasn’t going to point at him in open court, you know. Poor callow little brute.’
I didn’t know how to take this speech – or that I wanted to take it at all. So I tried to edge away from it.
‘I can understand, Mr Hayes, that there may be difficulties about money. I believe the school . . .’
‘He can get money out of his uncle – my wealthy brother-in-law. I never could, but Robin can. If his mother will let him, that is.’
‘About Oxford, then.’ I saw there was nothing for it but to take hold of the conversation as well as I could. ‘About which Honour School Robin should read. Am I right in thinking you see him as likely to go to the bar?’
‘His mother’s notion. Nonsense!’ Mr Hayes said this robustly. ‘He isn’t clever enough.’
‘Robin is a very adequately able boy.’
‘That may be. But even if you are a good deal more than that, you have to wait for years for your briefs. Of course he can be called, and then look round for some job having nothing to do with the courts, for which being a barrister is considered as some sort of subsidiary qualification. But money pouring away all the time.’
It seemed clear, and far from unaccountable, that financial considerations had become of paramount importance with Robin Hayes’s father. I tried again.
‘Then, Mr Hayes, have you any suggestion for the boy yourself?’
‘I think he might try for the police. Or perhaps the prison service.’ Mr Hayes gave me a swift glance, so that I wondered whether it amused him to see me for the moment dumbfounded. ‘I must speak to the Governor about it,’ he went on. ‘A Harrovian, but a very decent fellow. I’m a Carthusian myself.’
I didn’t like this at all – and chiefly because Mr Hayes didn’t really like it either. It had been an uneasy kind of humour, and I was surprised at my not having recognised in him the instant he came into the room an uneasy man. It was, after all, what he ought to be. From the moment of his being convicted his position had become impossible, or had vanished. He had no place in society, nor ever would have again.
Such for a time was to be my feeling after my visit to Hutton Green. I can now see that it was wrong and also snobbish. Had Mr Hayes been a genuine gardener of the humble ‘jobbing’ sort; had such been his unassuming position in life; had he simply reached through a window and grabbed a wallet: in these circumstances my mind would have encountered no difficulty in thinking in terms of adequate expiation, of rehabilitation, of recovered self-respect, and the like. Mr Hayes’s crime, one might say, had consisted in his having as a boy got himself sent to Charterhouse. Noblesse oblige – even the not very considerable noblesse that inheres in receiving an education among gentlemen. These were conventional reflections. At the same time I was puzzled by Mr Hayes, as if there were a side to him of which I was only obscurely aware – something unpredictable and not quite to be written off under the ‘shabby scoundrel’ formula.
But had my visit in the slightest way been any good? I decided that it had achieved nothing at all. As I had taken my leave of Mr Hayes I said a few words of the ‘if anything happens I’ll let you know’ order. It was a familiar utterance with me on concluding an interview with a parent, but it didn’t sound convincing when offered to a felon. (Whether Mr Hayes was technically a felon, I wasn’t sure. I had a notion one has to assault somebody to gain that status.) If I had come by anything it was a new, or augmented, view of Robin Hayes. His father had spoken disagreeably about him as a kind of family extortioner. In court he had protected his son – apparently by saying ‘Rolls-Royce’ when he should have said ‘Morgan’. But to me he had virtually insinuated that it was the boy’s demands which had prompted him to crime. This was horrible any way on; it could be felt as even more unsavoury than the suspicion I had shared with Miss Sparrow that Mr Hayes’s dire need of money might have had its background in blackmail not in the least of a domestic order.
Yet I doubted whether Robin’s conduct, even if it had been much as his father represented it to me, was justly to be viewed in a very unfavourable light. I reminded myself that at seventeen one can gain a licence and drive a car, and I knew that several of the boy’s contemporaries owned cars at home, although they were of course not allowed to bring them to school. They were mostly the sons of business people with plenty of money around. Robin might have been insufficiently aware that his father’s circumstances were very different. And of course there hadn’t actually been either a Morgan or a Rolls-Royce – Mr Hayes having presumably been ‘nicked’ before any such purchase was made. Again, school agreeably continuing through one’s nineteenth year, with Oxford or Cambridge to follow, was a taken-for-granted assumption by plenty of boys at Helmingham. All in all, it seemed to me that in an important point of character and family loyalty Robin Hayes deserved the benefit of any doubt. I was worried about him – or worried about him in a new way – all the same. It would be necessary to have a further private talk with him soon, since it was my duty to let him know that, at his mother’s prompting, I had been to see his father. This would be an awkward occasion, but good might come of it. I hadn’t seen much of the boy since his turning upon me the day before term began, and I felt that this was a matter of deliberate avoidance on his part. But ours was a situation in which misunderstandings could easily arise, so it was incumbent upon me to make it clear to him that I didn’t regard him and his problems as a nuisance.
When I got back to the House I found that (as so often happened) a major crisis had erupted during my absence. Something had gone wrong with the gas supply in the kitchen; the boys had been obliged to put up with a cold dinner; and several of them had protested in a sadly underbred way.