Hindsight Page 8

  Captain Smith came to two or three of the teas about midway through the term. He did not automatically figure in Paul’s Ideal Tea, but if thought about he might be there, a definite presence; it was as if he had been able to retract his large personality into himself, no longer immediately signalling to any newcomer that here was somebody rather formidable; only when approached and spoken to might he have given that stranger a hint of the reserves of moral energy available to him. And there was another thing—the plants, palms, hibiscuses, bougainvillaeas and all the tropical twiners and trailers seemed to suit him like a natural habitat; even his moustache ceased to be freakish and became just another exotic growth, so that he did not stand out (as he did up at the school, whether considered in the context of the milling boys or the gravely florid décor of Paddery itself) as something extraordinary.

  He spoke little and without all his actorly boom, ate one crumpet with relish, listened with attention to all that was said to or around him, and left early after making ambassadorial farewells. At his first visit Molly tried to tease him but with no success, so that she turned with extra malice on poor Mr Wither: Next time she left him alone but Paul noticed her watching him half-sideways, and another time when he wasn’t there asked Paul all about him—was he a good teacher, what did the boys make of him, why wasn’t he in the army if he was really a captain, where had he been before St Aidan’s—things like that. Paul only knew a few of the answers but Molly said, ‘Never mind. I’ll have him to supper one day and ask him myself. I’ll choose a day when I’m cross with darling Daisy. Isn’t it funny—he gives her the horrors? She’s rather clever at things like that. It’s a sort of second sight, very useful to a silly idiot like me, who trusts everyone. I always take her advice about tradesmen, whether they’re trying to cheat me, you know. I wonder if there isn’t something sinister about Captain Smith. He suits my jungle, doesn’t he? Like a sleepy old tiger? I bet his cave is full of bones.’

  Most or all of the other men would be officers from Exmouth, and sometimes one of them seemed to Paul to behave much more awkwardly than poor Mr Wither, but Molly didn’t mind and just bossed him around like everybody else. She had invented a game like Grandmother’s Footsteps, but much more complicated because players could approach ‘Grandmother’ up any of the four aisles that led towards the stove, and you could be penalised not merely for being seen moving but also for standing on the wrong part of the pattern of black and red tiles with which the aisles were paved. Molly usually won at the stalking­-­up part of the game, but the extraordinary performer was Daisy. When she was Grandmother it was almost impossible to get near her. She seemed to put herself in a sort of trance by the stove and to turn to and fro in a dazed way, but always at the deadly moment naming the victim in a leaden chant, solemn as a priest. She was like the creature in the nightmare, which will find you however you hide. She provided, in Paul’s gold-haze image of those evenings, the necessary dark vibrations.

  But almost as though she had been two separate people, he thought of Daisy as also doing something else. (No doubt, if he had chosen to, he could have summoned up yet more pictures—Daisy just sitting silent, nodding to herself, perhaps even weeping a little; or starting to tell one of the officers how important it was he should get killed as soon as possible, until Molly shut her up; or behaving like a perfectly ordinary dull old lady, only uglier than most.) One Sunday a new officer came, the squarest man Paul had ever seen, short and with vast broad shoulders. His square blue-white face was topped with very black coarse hair, and he had enormous hands with fingers so short that they looked more like toes. As soon as he was in the conservatory, before he had even taken off his greatcoat, he seized Molly’s hands between these huge paws and held them, staring at her.

  ‘You knew them all!’ he said in a churchy whisper.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You must be the one who wants to talk about books and paintings.’

  ‘I do! I do!’

  ‘Come and meet Daisy,’ she said. ‘I’m no use to you. I could tell you till the cows come home about writers being sick in my kitchen and painters trying to get into bed with me, but really I never opened a book and I still think a Brownie makes a better picture than anything.’

  The officer’s face changed ridiculously. Perhaps because it was so big it looked somehow like a child’s, a child who has had all its sweets taken away. Molly laughed.

  ‘Daisy O’Connell,’ she said, ‘Dee-Dee.’

  Again the huge mask changed, this time to amazement. Delighted with her game, Molly led the man across to where Daisy was sitting. Paul’s composite picture of her at the Sunday teas included this quite different woman, crouched forward in her chair, spouting a mixture of French and English—neither language making much sense to Paul—moving her hands about with fierce little clutching gestures as though the ideas she was discussing were objects which she could somehow catch and hold, while the sailor sat on his folded greatcoat at her feet and gazed up into her face like an adoring mastiff.

  ‘Look at them, Paul,’ whispered Molly. ‘Aren’t intellectuals a scream? I wonder if you’ll turn out like that, or are you a bit too cautious? You have to go the whole hog, you see, the utter whole hog.’

  Paul looked. Molly often talked to him about her guests, as if the teas were a sort of people-lesson. Sometimes she did it out loud, in order to tease and embarrass, but more often for him alone. But not really for him, for her. He was somebody she could say things to without interfering with the game she was playing—like one of the Sunday games back at the school, Monopoly or something, but with the people performing both as players and pieces. Because Pauf was not grown up he was outside the game.

  He couldn’t see the sailor’s face, only the devotion expressed in the curve of the spine and the crane of the immense neck. But Daisy faced him directly, and he could see how different she was, not just in her attitude and animation but in her physical appearance. She was even paler than usual, and her face was more lined and twitchy, but at the same time less blurred. Of course she was never really blurred, like an out-of-focus photograph, but that was the impression she usually gave, somehow smudgy and difficult to recognise. Now you felt you would have known her anywhere, not just for her ugliness. She looked a bit like Mrs Fison sometimes did after what Fison used to describe as ‘one of her evenings’.

  Daisy glanced up and said something to Molly in French, a question. Molly answered in the same language and Daisy returned to the sailor.

  ‘I wish I could talk French like that,’ said Paul.

  ‘You’ll have to fall in love with a French girl,’ said Molly. ‘I’ll find you one—you’re twelve now—in four years’ time would be perfect. This stupid war must be over before then. Blonde or brunette?’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Oh no. That would be a great mistake. Not till you’re thirty, at least. And then … then, Rogue, supposing you did find somebody like me …’

  ‘I don’t expect there is anyone.’

  ‘Ten out often, Mr Rogers. But if there is, try not to take her seriously. You’ll only get hurt. That’s the best bit of advice I’ll ever give you, so don’t forget it.’

  As usual Paul didn’t know whether she meant what she said or was pulling his leg. It did not seem odd that Molly should be able to spare time to talk to him when there were all the adult guests she was supposed to keep happy. She always hopped about between conversations anyway, like a bird among bushes, but still Paul got more than his ration. The pattern began on his very first Sunday. He came in with Miss Penoyre, inquisitive at the steamy grove of the conservatory but expecting to be taken through into a proper room beyond, and there were half a dozen people sitting round this big black church-stove. Molly (still Miss Benison to him, then) jumped up.

  ‘Hurrah!’ she said. ‘Listen everyone, I’ve been to the market and bought a crumpet-slave. His name’s Rogue and his father was one of my darlingest
friends. Come here, Rogue, and sit on this stool. Give your coat to Annette. Now, there are your crumpets and there’s your fork, and here’s a glove in case the fire’s too hot for your hands. Oh, isn’t this perfect! Sunday, and crumpets, and a slave to toast them!’

  ‘I wish I’d brought my butter ration,’ said somebody.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Miss Benison. ‘I’ve managed to wangle a bit extra from a sweet old farmer.’

  The ‘bit extra’ was a bright yellow mound, three weeks’ ration for a family at least. Paul was relieved to have something quite sensible to do, which he knew he could manage without making a fool of himself, but at the same time nervous about the potentialities of Miss Benison’s madness. He almost dropped the fork when he was taking the first crumpet off it because she scraped her chair up close beside him and said, ‘Lovely, I’ll do the buttering.’

  He muttered some kind of nothing as he passed the crumpet to her.

  ‘Do you mind not having a father?’ she said. ‘I’m glad that funny headmaster of yours calls you Rogue, because it means I can too. Do you?’

  ‘I’ve got a step now,’ said Paul.

  ‘Not the same thing. I adored mine when I saw him, although he was an appalling nuisance to everyone. We’re different, us almost-orphans. Look at Annette. She never even saw hers.’

  ‘I don’t think I notice much. We don’t seem to talk about our families when we’re at school.’

  ‘Isn’t that funny? I thought about mine all the time, or rather I imagined families I might have belonged to. I had a very peculiar childhood.’

  ‘Shall I do some of these browner than others?’

  ‘Yes, if you like. They’re best when the little black bits are just beginning to come, don’t you think? But what about the holidays?’

  ‘I’ve got three uncles. And I do like Duncan.’

  ‘Shall I tell you about your father?’

  Aunts in particular used to speak as though there was almost something wrong with Paul because he had no father, as though he needed special treatment rather in the same way Uncle Will had to have special food because of being gassed in the first war. Paul seldom actually thought about it, and when he did he managed to pretend to himself that he was sorry, but at other times he had a vague unconscious idea that it might be quite a good thing, in some ways. A year ago, for instance, his school work had gone off the boil. He still came top of Midway but not as easily as before, so The Man couldn’t really stop him going up into Schol. But The Man had written to Paul’s mother saying that if he didn’t pull himself together he was unlikely to reach any kind of scholarship standard. This was just after his mother had married Duncan, and poor Duncan had had the job of giving Paul a talking-to. It had not been comfortable for either of them, but Paul was aware that with a real father it would have been very much worse. A real father would have had so much more leverage, would have been able to squeeze and shove in ways Duncan couldn’t … Paul assumed that he would have loved and admired his father, but at the same time he felt that the absence left a space for him to grow into, in his own way, at his own speed. Perhaps if his father had had more time at home, leaving Paul with more memories, it would have been different. Miss Benison’s question was a surprise. It was not the kind of thing aunts suggested.

  ‘It depends,’ he said.

  ‘It always does. Are you going to risk it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re like him, you know. I arranged this on purpose so that I could see you sitting in front of that stove toasting crumpets. He used to sit like that in the hospital.’

  ‘Were you a nurse?’

  ‘They kept trying to send me home, but I got round them.’

  ‘You must have looked after hundreds and hundreds.’

  ‘Hundreds and hundreds. Lots of them became friends, but only a few were special friends, like your father. Of course he was English, and that helped. We had such a party when the news of his MC came through, too. It was one of the best nights in my life. He used to write to me for years. I’ve still got his letters—I just throw everything into a trunk and never look at it, but it’s there. Lovely letters, such fun, just like the dear man. Isn’t it extraordinary to think of somebody like that, with all that life in him, simply stopping—gone—because of a wing-tip getting a foot too close to the ground? And here you are instead, starting all over again.’

  ‘Shall I do another one?’

  ‘Oh yes. Don’t stop till the crumpets run out.’

  A man’s voice laughed overhead.

  ‘That sounds like your motto in life, Molly.’

  ‘No, because they never will. I’ll see to that.’

  She rose to take the plate of buttered crumpets round but returned and went on talking about Paul’s father. It gave Paul a curious sensation of only existing by accident, all this having happened long before his real parents had met—at a shooting-party near Bedford, his mother always said. Hearing about those old days was like hearing about an alternative world, in which there was not going to be a boy called Paul Rogers.

  The ideal, run-together Sunday tea ended with Paul and Mr Wither walking across the park with the last light fading and a few stars out. The path through the chestnut grove would be strewn with shield-shaped golden leaves. Mr Wither could walk quite fast, using a sturdy walking-stick and lurching on to his deformed leg at each step, an effortful gait that caused him to pant after the first hundred yards and made conversation difficult. Paul walked with what he thought of as his hillman’s stride beside him, using his gun as a staff. He always took it down to Sunday teas, just as he did on his deer-stalks, and in fact seldom thought of it as a gun. It had become a sort of talisman of his freedom to come and go as he wished. He kept it in a convenient slot between two stacks of lockers in the locker-room.

  They would come up the last slope, Mr Wither panting, but also chuckling or muttering inaudibly and exuding a general sense of enjoyment of the world. Paddery would stand in front of them, a dark and silent cliff, all its black-out in place, but the film show usually ended just about the time they let themselves in through the side door, and the night erupted with the racket of loosed boys.

  8

  How much of the foregoing is true, or even true? I find it impossible to say. Take the question of Daisy O’Connell and the ultra-square sailor, about which Dobbs was to challenge me: that man existed, I know. He already figured in my vague picture of tea in the conservatory (a picture even less focused and organised than I have made Paul’s appear). Thinking about him I summoned up a memory of Daisy talking with animation about books in a mixture of French and English, but looking more haggard and twitchy than usual. I believe that is also true, but admit that it might well be a product of my desire to create some sort of personality for her which I could then offer to Dobbs. With my after-knowledge I felt I could assume that the man she was talking to was one of the many conscript servicemen who compensated for the grind and desolation of their new life by stepping up whatever cultural interests they may previously have had—the audience for whom Connolly founded Horizon. The square sailor looked the part, so I put him in.

  The details of conversation are obviously yet more dubious. Yes, Molly did say she would find me a French girl to fall in love with and I asked for someone like her, and yes, she said with apparent earnestness that I wasn’t to try that till I was thirty and I would get hurt. And yes, I did get it into my head that she had nursed my father; but for that very reason it would be absurd of me to claim that her answer to my question was less direct than I’d taken it to be. To judge by Dobbs’s next letter that may well have been the case, but at least at the rational level I had thought otherwise, and had made her answer as I had simply because most conversations tend to proceed with a good deal of clutch-slip.

  Three explanations seem possible: coincidence; unconscious memory; imaginative truthfulness. As a writer who depend
s largely on his imagination, naturally I lean to the third. The imagination is a mechanism for producing worlds, and the more powerful it is the more coherent each world becomes. So, when you feed a few ingredients from the real world into the mechanism, your imaginary details and events must become coherent with reality, i.e. either true or ‘true’. Again and again writers invent things which turn out to be facts. This is never the amazing coincidence it seems, merely a sign that the coherence-mechanism is functioning well. So I was cheered by the things Dobbs told me about Molly and Daisy. It made me feel that the machine was humming.

  But if that was true of these sections of my novel it was not the case at all with the apparently straightforward work of going back and weaving in the material about plot and suspects which was supposed to turn my autobiographical ramblings into an orthodox whodunit. The machine groaned, hiccupped, juddered, stalled. The more purely invented the material, the less I was able to bring it into being. The two subsidiary masters—Floyd and Hutton—managed to stalk through a few unsatisfactory pages as just-visible ghosts of their real selves, but a quite fictional park ranger I needed simply refused to exist. Worse than that, he became a sort of nay-sayer. His unreality began to infect the areas surrounding the points at which he was supposed to put in an appearance. I was beginning to lose confidence in the whole idea (a vague but sinister sensation, analogous to the symptoms preliminary to the onset of flu) when Dobbs’s letter came.

  It was written in his own hand on paper from a ruled pad. I thought I detected a slight shakiness in the formation of the letters, and even if he had not said so I would have guessed from variations in size and spacing that it had been composed in several stages.

  Dear Rogers,

  Thank you very much for the latest instalment. I wish there had been more of it, but I cannot expect even you to produce at that sort of pace. Do you never get stuck or dry up?