‘Do you also know French?’ Mrs Courtney, he heard, was using the teasing voice grown-up people sometimes put on for children.
‘I can tell when I see it,’ he answered. ‘Mr Olliphant had the French
Fables.
’
‘Je t’adore, enfant ravissant!’
She made her dress swish. ‘You won’t know that. Which is all to the good. Men grow vain far too quickly.’
‘I’m not so stupid I can’t understand the bits that sound like English.’
If it was cheek, she had other things on her mind. Again she was looking at him as though he was something to eat. Or one of the little dogs ladies kept to pet. Then, not even that: something in the distance at which she had to narrow her eyes.
‘Harry,’ she said, ‘would love to teach you to ride—a sturdy boy like you.’
He didn’t have time to work out what she was getting at, because she asked: ‘Is your mother well? They tell me she’s had the baby.’ She didn’t sound all that interested, but she had been brought up to pretend to be.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Septimus. That means “Seventh”.’
She drew her breath in. From the looks of her, she might have begun fondling him again, only Edith came and said: ‘Mrs Duffield is in a state, Madam, wondering where he is.’
The parlourmaid was ready to share this joke with her mistress. He hated Edith.
‘Then he must go at once,’ Mrs Courtney ordered; she had finished her game and was perhaps annoyed her maid had found her wasting her time.
‘There is so much to do,’ she complained to no one in particular as she led the way back into the mauve octagon. ‘I never seem to catch up.’
She sat down at her desk, scuffling the papers, looking for something she must have mislaid. Whether she had found it or not, she took up a stone pen and began dabbling in a crystal well. She didn’t even say good-bye.
Edith led him stiffly through the house. The room through which he had sailed breathless on the outward voyage looked darker and duller in the changed light. Two of the knobs in the parlourmaid’s backbone stood out between her collar and where the roots of her hair began, below the cap: they were the only points of interest on the journey back, to where Mumma was creating in the laundry.
‘Hurtle, I’ll never bring you—never ever again! Running off and leaving the baby! There might have been an accident.’ Always at the end of a washing day she had that boiled look, of suet crust.
He hadn’t any excuses to make; so he went and looked in the linen basket. ‘Doesn’t he look good!’ he said, paying a compliment as Mrs Courtney had advised.
Mumma only mumbled.
Presently Edith returned with the wages. ‘Madam would like to see the baby. But another time. She’s too busy at the moment.’
Mumma didn’t answer. She put the money in her old purse, which she did up in the bundle with some slices of a pudding May had allowed for the kids. Then they picked up their things and went.
That holidays he felt even farther from Lena and the little ones. Except Will, who would burrow into his back, in their sleep in the bed they shared in the harness room. Will was so soft and hopeless you couldn’t help feel he was your brother. Not that you were soft. Mrs Sullivan came and complained:
That boy that Hurt has bashed our Tommy we didn’t need the stitches but nearly did.
Pa got out the strap, but put it away after Mrs Sullivan left, he said she had an Irish grudge.
Poor Pa. Wish you could have felt closer to him.
Mumma kept her word about Courtneys’.
‘Aren’t I gunner go down there before the holidays end?’ Mumma only made sounds, and went on with what she was doing.
‘But didn’t they ask for me?’ he always asked. ‘Didn’t
Mr
Courtney ask yet?’
Mumma looked down her cheekbones at the ironing or the stove.
So he would climb up into the pepper tree where roosting fowls had whitened the branches. He would sit rubbing off the crust, thinking. Some way some something to show Courtneys what they had forgotten. If he could show what he knew and felt. Their bloody old French painting. Sometimes he looked at his pale thing to help pass the holidays he held up the skin and it shrivelled back he didn’t know what he groaned as the morning stretched out blue as turquoise smelling of chaff and fowl shit.
The term was worse, though. He could never concentrate for looking out of the window. Beetle Boothroyd sent a note. But it was not that which put Mumma against him. She had already turned. She would kiss him, but her breath had tears in it, waiting to break out.
What had he done, then? She couldn’t know he loved Mrs Courtney. Because he didn’t. He was in love with how she looked. Each of her dresses was more than a dress: a moment of light and beauty not yet to be explained. He loved her big, silent house, in which his thoughts might grow into the shapes they chose. Nobody, not his family, not Mrs Courtney, only faintly himself, knew he had inside him his own chandelier. This was what made you at times jangle and want to explode into smithereens.
It wasn’t till next holidays, it was a Courtney Monday, Mumma began combing him.
‘They’ve asked for you,’ she said, ‘so I’ve got to take you, or I wouldn’t.’
He made himself look stupid and unmoved.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘never draw on the walls. If you spoil the Courtney’s walls like you done the ones at home, I won’t know how to take their money.’ Pa had said Mumma was too honest.
Now you didn’t answer because your heart was being sucked in and out too fast. All this combing and smoothing: was it to do with what Pa and Mumma had been talking about?
That night he had gone across the yard after everyone was put to bed, after Pa had turned out the gas in the kitchen. He had gone across to snitch a slice of bread, a smear of dripping.
Pa and Mumma were in their room, where Septimus also slept.
This was where Pa accused her of being honest, and Mumma shouted back: ‘What are you, Jim, if not honest? That’s what I married yer for. Nothun else that I can think of.’
Then she raised her voice higher still, told him not to shove her. She was crying as they got into the jingling bed. You could imagine their rough skins together.
The house was full of sleeping children. Only the bed with Mumma and Pa continued creaking, sniffling, sighing.
The dripping was the lovely brown kind.
Mumma said: ‘There’s rats again, Jim, I swear. I seen the droppings on the scullery shelf.’
Pa coughed once above the jingle jingle of the loose brass. He let Mumma do the talking.
On she went. ‘Jim? DidnItellyer? There’s rats? We oughter lay the baits. Eh? But nothun is ever. Without I do it. With me own hand.’
It was always safer to cut and run before the bedstead quietened down, but now the voices in the next room wouldn’t let you go.
The bed gave one last ring, like a bicycle almost on top of you. Pa sighing. He had had a hard day’s work.
‘Arr dear,’ Mumma complained, ‘when it comes to pleasure, you men are all the same—the decent ones, or the ones that knock yer teeth in.’
Pa was coughing up some phlegm. ‘Never got nothing out of it yerself?’ Unusual for Pa. ‘Did yer? Now did yer?’
‘I got seven kiddies—that the father forgets when it suits ’im to.’
You could hear the toenails scraping on the sheet.
‘Pity the children—what they’re born to if they’re out of luck! That little girl of Mrs Courtney’s with the funny back, at least she’ll never suffer this part.’
Pa was yawning. He farted once.
‘You know, Jim, I pray—every night—for a better life—for ours.’
There was a rancid bit in the dripping. What if it was true what Mumma said? She had seen the droppings on the shelf.
‘All the children.” Mumma sounded wide awake. ‘Hurtle in particular.’
Pa grunted.
‘Hurtle’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘’S ’air’s a lovely bright.’
‘The boy’s a boy.’
‘A boy can be beautiful too. To anyone with eyes. Mrs Courtney’s taken with Hurtle. Says ’e’s adorable. And clever. Could be some sort of genius. I could’uv told ’er that if I ’adn’t been the mother. Mr Courtney will want to see ’im. You should see Mr Courtney, Jim. Every one of ’is suits made to measure in London—so the girls was telling. Boots too. ’As ’is own last—in the shop—in London.’
Pa snoring.
In the end it wasn’t so interesting: you got what Mrs Courtney would have called ‘bored’, and the dripping lying a bit bilious.
Then Mumma said, very distinct: ‘I would give away any of my children, provided the opportunities were there. Blood is all very well. Money counts. I would give—I would give Hurtle.’
Pa’s snore came roaring back up his throat. ‘Give away yer children?’
Mumma laughed a rattling sort of laugh. ‘Plenty more where they come from.’
‘That’s all very well for the mother. It’s the father they blame. What’ud they say? Can’t support ’is own kids!’
‘The father!’
‘Wouldn’t be ethical, anyway.’
‘Ethical’s a parson’s word.’
‘What if the boy could ’ear ’is mum and dad entertainin’ such an idea!’
Got out after that. Sand between your toes across the yard. The little, sharp, scratchy pebbles. Will was flopping around in the bed like a paralysed fowl. White eyelids. Glad of your brother to stop the shivers. Mothers and fathers, whoever they were, really didn’t matter: it was between you and Death or something.
And now Mumma was combing out the dandruff because Courtneys had asked for him. Well, he would swallow down what he had overheard. His bumping heart would wait and accept whatever was offered or decided.
After they had passed Taylor Square, after they had got far enough on, Mumma walked with scarcely a word. Because of their important business they had left Sep with Mrs Burt, who had her new baby, and would give theirs a suck. Mumma’s black old skirt was picking up the dust very easy: the hem had become unstitched. He tried to imagine her in Mrs Courtney’s hat with the quills, but the tails of her hair hung down behind, where the comb couldn’t hold them up. Her skin was yellow today.
She took his hand in her cracked hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What are you looking at?’
He began walking as he would, he felt, in a London suit, holding hands with Mrs Courtney, and it seemed as though the maid they passed polishing a doctor’s plate was already looking different at him.
Mumma brightened, though one corner of her mouth was twitching. ‘Are you hungry, love? You’ll feel better for a bite of something.’
He ought to love poor Mumma for looking at him like that. He did, too: nothing else was real. There was nothing wrong in imagining a thing or two about himself and Courtneys.
Mumma saw he was having trouble with his boot. ‘If your sole’s coming off, Hurtle, slide your foot along the carpet when you go inside, then nobody’ll notice.’
Her hand tightened as they began to clatter down the steep asphalt towards the ‘Tradesmen’s Entrance’. Once or twice his sole flapped.
Half the morning he spent in the yard chucking stones at nothing.
‘What are you—you haven’t
done
anything?’ she called, looking out from the laundry at the bush house where Mr Thompson grew the tuberous begonias.
‘Edith will fetch you,’ she came again to the doorway to call, the drops falling from her hands which the water had pleated.
His throat swelled. It was the strong, steamy smell of pampered plants and tan-bark.
But Edith didn’t show up: it was Mr Courtney himself who came walking alongside the wall, smoking a square-looking cigar. He blew out the smoke firmly but gently. The rest of him fitted the head and shoulders you had already seen in the photograph. He was a large man.
They were looking at each other. Without giving anything away. The beard was as well kept as everything else in the garden and house. You wondered how it would have felt. All along the brick wall the geranium flowers were blazing up.
‘Hurtle Duffield!’ Mr Courtney said, and it was like you heard your own name for the first time: it sounded so important.
While Mr Courtney continued blowing smoke, and smiling, he was in search of more to say. His cuff-links, with their tangle of initials, didn’t help him. His ears had large, cushiony lobes, from one of which he hadn’t wiped the shaving soap.
‘My wife tells me you’re interested in books and things.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth as though he might have said too much.
You would have liked to show you weren’t just a boy, and stupid. But the silence stretched and stretched. There was an insect brown as a stick clinging to a geranium leaf. You could only stare at the insect, and wish you had something to offer. If you could at least have come to life: climbed up by Mr Courtney’s trouser leg, grappling his hairy suit, pummelling, punching, not exactly kissing, but plunging your face into the mass of frizzy beard.
Instead, you were slowly sweating, as still and mindless as the stick insect.
Again Mr Courtney took the cigar out of his mouth, and put his other hand, firm but fleshy, in the middle of your back. ‘Perhaps you could do with a piddle,’ he suggested, ‘before we go inside. You can pop round behind the bush house.’
It was a relief to slip away for a minute or two, not that you had much to get rid of, but as you shook off the last drops on the heap of rotting grass clippings, the morning loosened.
When you went back Mr Courtney told: ‘Round about your age I remember going on a long drive. In the country. At night. With my father and Archdeacon Rutherford.’ He broke up his sentence with short puffs at the cigar, his lips glossy and contented.
It was strange, though comforting, to hear Mr Courtney’s smoky voice mention his father’s friend by name, as though taking it for granted that you too had known Archdeacon Rutherford.
‘I would have given anything to stop the buggy. But didn’t know how. In front of the archdeacon. He was a very thin old man. I used to picture his guts resting flat against his backbone.’