These events took place on a Saturday, and I need hardly say that I woke up on the Sunday morning wondering what I ought to do about them. The wise answer seemed to be, ‘Not too much’. If an eighteen-year-old youth feels for one reason or another pretty miserable, and if he goes out to dine with an intemperate older companion and ends up much the worse for drink, it is his own affair and should be so regarded. If at an Oxford or Cambridge college such a young man demonstrates his condition by breaking a few windows he will have to pay for the repair of them; if his behaviour has been yet more objectionable he will have to present himself before some dean or censor, submit to brisk admonishment, and at least suffer a fine to be chalked up against him in the college books. But unless some extreme grossness has been involved, there the matter will endI could see that in a boarding-school, even though the youth be of almost the same age, different conditions must be taken into account. Oxford and Cambridge colleges get along without prefects, so on nobody is imposed the duty of setting an example to anybody else. And there are no younger boys around, to be startled and perhaps frightened by the spectacle of inebriety in one of whom they are expected to be to a certain extent in awe. There was a further trickiness in Robin Hayes’s position in this regard. As Head of House he was accountable to me, and in practice to me alone. But the office made him, ipso facto, a school prefect as well. In other words, the previous night’s occurrence was John Stafford’s problem as much as it was mine.
That the Head Master (not to speak of Miss Sparrow) had, as it may be expressed, walked in on the act struck me as not altogether unfortunate. I’d have had to tell Stafford about the incident anyway. Now the natural thing would be that he would take the initiative in contacting me with some temperately phrased inquiry as to what I felt about the background of the affair. But what did I feel? Whatever Stafford concluded, it was at least clear to me that I must without loss of time have it out with Robin personally. But I’d give myself – by way of ordering matters in my own head – until after School Prayers that morning.
Helmingham was from its inception a strongly Anglican school. As in many similar schools, the chapel dominates the scene. It is a huge affair, with a capacity which must have been vastly in excess of its first complement of boys: a formidable expression of the ethos governing nineteenth-century upper middle-class education. A lofty structure in Butterfield’s best Gothic manner, it has niched over its west portal an uncommonly good copy (it might almost be a replica) of Donatello’s St George as carved for Or San Michele. This, a later embellishment, must have been the gift of a wealthy Old Boy of cultivated taste. Martial saints and knights are also prominent in the stained glass. In the great west window is St George again, this time grappling with his dragon – a writhing brute which the school variously allegorised as German Militarism, the Tobacco Industry, the Demon Drink, and Sex Rearing its Ugly Head. In lancets on each side of this, Sir Gareth and Sir Geraint set out on their respective quests – the first without his taunting but irresistible Lynette, and the second with the unfortunate Enid, drooping behind her leash of horses laden with an ironmonger’s stock of armour, well out of the picture.
In this temple of muscular Christianity Helmingham boys formerly spent a good deal of time through every day of a twelve-week term, but by the period of which I write this regimen had been relaxed, and devotions were compulsory on Sunday mornings alone. It by no means followed that the chapel was unoccupied at other times. Every school has its minority of extremely religious boys, and Helmingham happened to possess in a certain Father Edwards an elderly chaplain who was popular not only with the pious but with the profane as well – this universality of appeal being contributed to by the fact Father Edwards owned a keen interest in theatrical concerns of a non-ecclesiastical sort, and was a moving spirit in the mounting and producing of school plays. But the religious boys kept him very busy in the chapel throughout the week. They insisted on a great deal of auricular confession, experimented with censers and asperges, and organised mini-services designed to convert their contemporaries in the surrounding villages.
But School Prayers on Sunday – a kind of matins – is the great occasion. On weekdays the boys wear, and have always worn, skimpy black-stuff gowns in class; at School Prayers they appear, as do the masters, in surplices. They like this, since all boys like dressing up, and the spectacle of these virginal rows of healthy youth particularly pleases those parents, of whom there are always a good many, who are week-ending in the neighbourhood for the purpose of entertaining their sons and their sons’ friends. To this soothing institution I betook myself on the morrow of Robin Hayes’s disastrous ill-conduct.
The boys sit house by house and in more or less prescriptive places: the small fry at the front and on a lower level than their seniors. We prayed and made responses with precision; we sang Bunyan’s hymn; we listened to a short sermon from Father Edwards. Perhaps betrayed by an exceptional mildness in the November air, Father Edwards drifted from rugger to cricket when in search of metaphors, and we heard a good deal about the Great Scorer and what He is best pleased to have notched up at the end of the game. The boys listened to this familiar homily, straight out of the age of Sir Henry Newbolt, not so much with an appearance of polite interest as in a kind of friendly inattentiveness. The Head Master, who sat a little higher than anybody else, showed himself as exempt from listening at all, since he spent every minute of the service in gazing, or seeming to gaze, successively into the heart of each individual among the six hundred boys before him. This systematic exercise must have been alarming to new boys subjected to it. But the school as a whole accepted the scrutiny as part of the show, and there was always a feeling of disappointment when it happened that on one Sunday or another Stafford failed to turn up.
Towards the end of the sermon I found I was myself doing a certain amount of scrutinising. It chanced that I sat in my stall (a station of some minor dignity) just opposite the boys of School House, and I was trying to decide which of them was that David Daviot for whose sake – I had to face it – Robin Hayes had returned to Helmingham.
Being at the start of his second year at the school, David was likely to be one of the ten or a dozen boys in the second pew from the front. He was probably – although Iain Macleod hadn’t said so – good-looking. Yet this wasn’t certain, since it might have been the pathos of an ugly duckling that had won Robin’s heart. As he had lately been a captive of the bug, it was possible that David would still be looking a bit under the weather. Were it true that he had indeed been the object of bullying and even of sexual abuse, it was predictable that, if at all a sensitive plant, he would be very woebegone indeed.
What I saw was a row of perfectly healthy-looking small boys. Deprived of bottoms and equipped with wings, they might have served agreeably as a choir of cherubs in a sentimental late-Murillo type of picture. But to say this is, of course, to exaggerate their juvenility. They were probably without exception in their fifteenth year – but at a public school that counts as being a small boy still. Eighty or a hundred years before, they would all have been enduring rather a tough time, much as a matter of course. According alike to Macleod and to Tim Taplow’s dawning sense of the situation, they were enduring just that now. I couldn’t see that they showed any very obvious sign of this. Perhaps they had rapidly recuperated during their privileged quarantine while under illness or the threat of it. Boys do pick up quickly . . . Suddenly I realised why these quite random thoughts were going through my head. I was dodging the consciousness that this pleasing row of boys, although cropped, tubbed, scrubbed and surpliced alike, were not uniform in every way. They were all, I suppose, reasonably personable lads. But one of them was very personable indeed. That he was David Daviot I didn’t for a moment doubt. And my heart sank as I regarded him.
It would be no good going on to try to describe David – to say that he had blue eyes or golden curly hair (as he certainly had) or this sort of mouth or that sort of nose. I have very little sense of such appearances. I had no notion, for instance, whether this supremely pretty boy was or was not likely to mature into a handsome man. I just saw what had brought Robin Hayes in thrall. And I didn’t like it a bit.
Tim Taplow was sitting almost opposite to me, looking worried and irritated. I imagine he was one of those conscientious unbelievers who are troubled at putting in even a formal appearance at any sort of religious service, but who hesitate to make what they would regard as self-important nuisances of themselves by consistently staying away. What occurred to me now was that on the previous evening I ought not to have avoided telling him everything I knew about his David Daviot and my Robin Hayes, and I resolved to do so as soon as the service was over. But he slipped off before I could get hold of him, and it was with Father Edwards that I found myself walking away from the chapel. What was running in my head bobbed up, all the same.
‘Father,’ I said – for Edwards liked to be addressed in this way – ‘you know every soul in the place. Would the child at the end of the second row of School House go by the name of Daviot?’
‘Yes, indeed, Robert. David Daviot. Puck.’
‘Puck?’ This perplexed me.
‘Ah—I forgot you were in foreign parts last term. We did A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the summer play, and I gave Daviot the role of Puck. He had shown himself to be uncommonly precocious in the theatrical way. He got a lot of applause.’ Father Edwards, although an old man encased within a heavy and trailing cassock, was striding vigorously forward. ‘At the moment I’m worried about him, as a matter of fact.’
So was I. But I reflected that Edwards’s worry was not necessarily the same as mine. Perhaps the boy was in his confirmation class, and – precocious in this field as well – expressing intellectual doubts which would make it difficult conscientiously to present him to the bishop when the appointed day came.
‘Is he clever?’ I asked tentatively.
‘I don’t know that he is. Certainly not very clever. Were he that, a small success wouldn’t have turned his head.’
‘I see.’ In fact I judged this to be the generalisation of one disposed to an optimistic view of human nature. ‘Do you mean that his managing an attractive Puck has resulted in his becoming stage-struck?’
‘Precisely that – or that and an incident he says took place in the holidays. I hardly know whether or not he be romancing.’
‘What was the incident, Father?’
‘Well, he says there must have been some sort of talent-scout present at our play. It’s just possible. In fact, I’ve known it to occur. But that was when I happened to have the son of a distinguished actor in my cast. What Daviot says is that this man later approached him in a public park.’
‘My dear Father!’
‘Well, yes, Robert—yes. But Daviot was helping a younger cousin to sail a toy boat somewhere – perhaps in the Round Pond – when this person approached him and began talking about an audition with the B.B.C. The man said he hadn’t gone to Daviot’s home – which is, of course, in London – because he knew he had a very strict father – no, that’s not right: grandfather – who wouldn’t countenance any such distraction from the boy’s studies. Those weren’t David’s words, but that was the gist of the thing.’
‘And did the boy fall for it?’
‘No, he didn’t. He says that the man was “nosy” – asking him a lot about his particular friends at school, and that sort of thing.’
‘Any boy is likely to resent that.’
‘Yes, indeed. But I gathered young Daviot did chat to the fellow for quite some time, and then – quite why, I didn’t gather – got uneasy at what he’d been induced to talk about, and the way things were going. So he says he said – and it’s quite absurd – that he would have to consult his agent. And then he and his cousin struck sail, you may say, and went home. I suppose he had been frightened – and quite right, too.’
‘It’s an odd story, Father.’
‘And completely made up? I thought so at the time. But something equally odd has come under my observation since – here at school, and in the second week of term. I had gone down to our far meadow, which hardly anybody goes near, so it’s a capital place for meditation. And there I had a glimpse of David Daviot talking to a strange man. Not, incidentally, a gentleman. I didn’t interfere, but I mentioned the thing to Tim Taplow that evening. Tim didn’t show much interest. I think he put me down as a senile old chap with a dirty mind.’
‘In that case, Father, I’ll own to a dirty mind too. The boy strikes me as a perfect garçon fatal – if such a thing may be.’ I almost added, ‘As a matter of fact, one of my senior lads in Heynoe is much taken up with him at this moment.’ But I forbore. Edward was no doubt the man responsible for the spiritual welfare of the whole crowd of us. But he was not the first person to whom I should reveal – or was it betray? – the confidence which Iain Macleod had reposed in me. I hadn’t even managed to speak to Taplow about it. And that, certainly, I ought by now to have done. This thought was becoming insistent with me.
So I took leave of our chaplain and went back to the House. I had barely got out of my surplice and thought of a drink when the telephone rang. I wasn’t surprised.
‘Syson, this is Stafford. Do I disturb you?’
‘No, Head Master. You do not.’
‘I thought that we ought to have a word – that I ought to seek a word of advice – about that small affair last night. I apologise for gate-crashing it. Was that Hayes? I had only a glimpse, you know.’
‘Yes. Robin Hayes. My Head Boy.’
‘Have you had a word with him since?’
‘I haven’t seen him since. And he wasn’t in chapel.’
‘He’ll have to explain that, I suppose?’
‘He will.’
‘And the general circumstances of the thing as well?’
‘Yes. I imagine, Head Master, that Hayes will do that when he comes to me to apologise, as I don’t doubt he will do this afternoon.’
‘Good, Syson. That sounds good. Of course there has been all this strain over his father. One sympathises very much. Is it your impression that he just went out on a blind?’
‘Definitely not. He was invited out to dinner by an uncle on his mother’s side. A man called Jasper Tandem, who came to call on me beforehand. It was all perfectly regular.’
‘Of course, of course. Was it a party for Hayes and some friends?’
‘No. It was just the boy himself. His uncle said he wanted to talk family business with him. Something of that kind.’
‘Then I’d suppose, Syson, that the fellow ought to have noticed. Don’t you think? I mean that his nephew was drinking far too much. It strikes me as a little odd.’
‘It strikes me, Head Master, as very odd indeed.’ I suppose I was becoming annoyed by this thinly veiled interrogation. ‘The thing has the appearance of having been downright malicious. I have formed an unfavourable impression of this Jasper Tandem.’
‘That, Syson, of course weighs with me a great deal. Has the family situation resulted in this uncle’s taking over responsibility for the boy in any formal way? Had you had anything of the kind communicated to you by the boy’s mother or by a lawyer?’
‘Nothing of the sort.’
‘I suppose his returning his nephew to us dead drunk to be sufficient ground for my writing to him asking him not to visit Helmingham again. It’s something I’ve had to do before – and if you advise it I’ll do it in this case.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind, Head Master. Meanwhile, there’s the question of Hayes’s position in the school.’
‘We go easy.’ Stafford snapped this out with conviction. ‘Demote your Head Boy while his father’s in gaol, and you don’t know where you are. Quite probably in the gutter press. And fortunately his lapse didn’t happen exactly coram publico. That other lad was Macleod, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘A reliable boy. I know his people. And, of course, there was your Miss Sparrow, who bundled me out of the door pretty well before I’d taken in the state of play myself. You must find her an invaluable woman, Syson.’ Stafford paused for a moment. ‘Capable of a quick decision when required.’
Whether I thought I deserved this one, I won’t say. But I left it to Stafford to continue the talk if he found it useful to do so. And of course he did – to make a deft return to amenity.
‘But, my dear Syson, it’s entirely for you to decide. If you think the boy should be sent home, home he’ll go.’
‘To be sent home’ was our school formula for expulsion. And it had been darkly in my mind that Stafford might have taken it into his head that Robin had better depart. So I was, in fact, relieved.
‘I’ll probably tell him,’ I said, ‘that he will be homeward bound if it happens again. That’s only fair to him. But this time we’ll lay all the blame on the bad uncle. Incidentally, I rather think he tipped the boy lavishly.’ I am not sure why I went on to this unnecessary detail, except that Robin’s action with what Miss Sparrow had said was a cheque was somehow coming to occupy a very uncomfortable position in my mind.
‘Well, nothing could be more normal and blameless than that,’ Stafford said – evidently slightly surprised. ‘If I’d been visited by an uncle at Marlborough and hadn’t made a quid out of it, I’d have been very aggrieved indeed. As you’d have been at poor old Harrow-on-the-Hill.’
A facetious remark of this sort was unlike John Stafford, and took me by surprise. I had been wondering whether I had a duty to tell him there and then that, as well as trouble at home, Robin Hayes had trouble of a different order in School House. But this I didn’t now do, and our telephone conversation ended.
‘About last night. I’ve come to apologise.’
As I had predicted, Robin was in my study that afternoon. He still looked physically disordered, and a slight down on his face suggested to me that he hadn’t shaved. I ought to have been pleased that he had thus promptly turned up. But in fact I had felt that something was going to go wrong from the instant of his entering the room. Once or twice boys had been sent to me by a well-meaning colleague with a command to apologise to me about this or that. And they had done so with an icy formality which had been very disagreeable indeed. Nobody could have given Robin such an order on the present occasion (Miss Sparrow was far too sensible to have done so), but the effect was much as it had then been. Robin Hayes was in the presence of an enemy, or at least of somebody hopelessly in an enemy’s camp.
‘And to resign,’ he said.
‘Resign? Resign from what?’
‘From being your Head Boy, of course. Unless it’s unnecessary, because I’m going to be chucked out of the school. Iain tells me the Head Master was lurking around last night.’
‘He certainly was not lurking. And you are certainly not going to be chucked out. That’s his decision, just as it would be mine. As for resigning, Robin, I’ve heard that from you before. I’ve also heard you talk about the loyalty biznai. It’s time you got going on it. I know that various difficulties and discouragements beset you – miseries, if you like. Nothing can be better for you in that situation than to grit your teeth and do your thing. And not take to the bottle. In fairness I have to mention that, although I won’t do it again. Another performance of that kind, and you will be on your way home. At the moment you’re Head of House and a school prefect as well.’
‘Iain tells me he has told you about—about David.’
‘So he has – and he told me he was going to tell you he’d told me. I think he has been most terribly concerned, Robin. But whether he ought to have discussed it with me, I hardly know. There are sad things among young people that older people can’t really be much help over.’
Robin was silent for a moment, and I felt that it was by way of conveying the impression that he had been listening to a thoroughly feeble speech. Perhaps he had.
‘You’re only thinking of the fact that I’m fond of the kid,’ he said. ‘I expect that’s just my bad luck – just as my father is bad luck. But you’re no good. None of you lot are any good. You won’t face up to what can happen in those places. That bloody Belsen! It’s contemptible. I hate it, hate it! Fuck you all.’ And Robin Hayes turned and walked out of the room.
So thus had the boy apologised. I was left in a condition which might conventionally be described as ‘stunned’. But in fact it was a condition more complex, or merely confused, than that. There was an element of relief in it. Robin, it seemed to me, had tumbled abruptly from a crise de nerfs into a condition of positive nervous breakdown. However deplorable the state of affairs in School House (and I strongly suspected that Iain Macleod’s highly coloured account of it had itself been influenced by Robin’s rhetoric) what I had just been treated to was a sick boy’s disproportionate reaction to a testing situation. It was also the reaction of a boy who had been plied with wine to the point of helpless drunkenness by an uncle whom I was increasingly disposed to view in a sinister light. But a sick Robin Hayes – and this was where my fugitive sense of relief came in – was a Robin Hayes who would become sane and well again. He was to be seen as ill – and illnesses run their course.
I had arrived at this facile and comforting view of the matter when, for the second time that day, I was summoned to the telephone.
‘Pog.’ For a moment this conveyed nothing to me.
‘Pog – it’s Owen Marchmont.’
‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘Hallo, Owen.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
‘Do your boys get newspapers?’
‘Newspapers?’ Not surprisingly, I was bewildered. ‘Yes, of course. The senior ones have their own papers delivered to them in their studies, and I always see to it that there’s a paper in the junior day-room. But why . . .?’
‘That boy Hayes is still with you?’
‘Yes, of course.’ An indefinable foreboding assailed me. ‘Is there bad news for him?’
‘I suppose it’s that. Anyway, you’d better get hold of him and let him have it before he comes across it in one of tomorrow’s rags. His father has left us.’
‘Left you? I don’t understand.’
‘This is an open prison, isn’t it – heaven help us? Just walked out – you might say with his brief-case and his bowler hat and his umbrella.’
‘Owen, surely that’s madness? And he’ll be picked up in no time?’
‘Of course it is – in a way. And of course he will be, without doubt.’
‘And then he’ll be transferred to somewhere much less pleasant for the rest of his time?’
‘He may be—but, you know, the system is extremely rum. I’ve ceased to think I’ll ever understand it. But there it is. I’m deprived of the society of Mr Hayes, that distinguished legal luminary and former Carthusian. It’s quite a blow.’
I realised that, to the Governor of Hutton Green, it was a blow; that it further undermined what faith in his institution he retained. I felt annoyed with Mr Hayes. Then I remembered Robin, and my annoyance turned to anger.
‘The stupid old bastard!’ I said. ‘As it happens, his boy has a good deal of trouble on his plate already, just at present. This will be a bit more.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Pog. But the kid mustn’t take it too hard. It shows a certain spunk in his old dad – in a way.’
‘It shows nothing of the kind.’
‘If you’d been put in quod, Pog, and suddenly saw an open door in front of you . . .’
‘All right, Owen—all right. Where do you think the chap will have made for? His unappealing wife in that cathedral city?’
‘Perhaps so. But what about his son and Helmingham? Give me a call – there’s a good fellow – if the door-bell rings and there he is in front of you.’ Marchmont paused briefly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s got me a little rattled, really. I’ll keep you informed, Pog. Goodbye.’
And the telephone went dead with a click.
Marchmont’s news must be conveyed to Robin at once, and perceiving this made me realise that my relationship with the boy had now become almost an impossible one. It was all very well to tell myself he was sick; his behaviour, and the words with which he had left me, suggested a trouble better to be described as a personality change – if that expression didn’t imply something with a character of permanence I wasn’t prepared to accept. The disturbance, however radical for the moment, would pass as a brain-storm passes. Of this I remained convinced, but the conviction didn’t make for less of awkwardness – really impossible awkwardness – in the short term. Sadly I had to confess to myself that there was no point (or none but the wretched Daviot aspect of the thing) in Robin Hayes remaining for another day at Helmingham. Nor, I found, did I want to summon him and attempt as sympathetically as possible to tell him of his father’s stupid behaviour. He had, in effect, told me to get lost, and I had an irrational feeling that there would be an element of ungenerous retort in giving him such dismal information. In this demoralised condition I thought of Father Edwards, who was regarded throughout the school as the proper man to convey to a boy the fact of some sudden domestic tragedy. Mr Hayes’s conduct wasn’t quite of that order, but I didn’t see why Edwards shouldn’t be brought in. So I rang him up, explained as much of the situation as was necessary, and readily persuaded him to come over to Heynoe and seek out Robin Hayes at once.
It thus came about that I didn’t see Robin again on that Sunday. Nor was he on view at breakfast on the Monday morning. This was no more than a mild irregularity, and although I thought of sending Iain Macleod to haul him out of bed (these two boys had bedrooms of their own, immediately adjoining the two junior dormitories; the other senior boys had what were called study-bedrooms) it seemed to me better not to fuss. Then at lunch-time a colleague rang me up to say that Hayes hadn’t appeared at two classes, and as there hadn’t been a chit about him he supposed he’d better let me know. I said something vague about the boy’s having been seedy the day before, and put down the receiver. Within seconds the bell rang again and I was listening once more, to John Stafford’s voice.
‘Syson? I’ve had a note from Hayes.’
‘From the boy’s father, Head Master?’ I supposed that Mr Hayes had been employing his precariously achieved liberty to enter into correspondence with Stafford about his son.
‘Of course not. From the boy himself. It enclosed a blank cheque to pay for the repair of your front door. He wasn’t minded, he says, to hand it to you himself.’
‘How very extraordinary.’ Most of the senior boys had their own bank accounts, and it wasn’t this turning up of another cheque in the affair that astonished me. It was the further evidence of Robin’s complete alienation.
‘Or to say goodbye.’
‘To what?’
‘He has departed, Syson. Had you happened to see a taxi leaving your own shattered door an hour ago, you might also have seen your Head Boy inside it.’
‘I see.’ I took hold of myself as I spoke – resolved, although for the moment almost shattered by this intelligence, to deal with it in a forthright and composed fashion. ‘Perhaps – if in a graceless way – he has made a sensible enough decision. Oxford is in front of him, and his having come back to school wasn’t working out too well. He was having difficulties.’
‘So it appears – and that one of the difficulties goes by the name of Daviot. I hadn’t been apprised of it.’ And Stafford made one of his pauses. ‘Of Hayes’s departure in itself I’d not be disposed to take much account, Syson. But unfortunately he hasn’t departed alone. He has taken Daviot – a very much younger boy – along with him.’