‘Don’t mind about Pecky,’ he said with good nature and a light heart.
‘I don’t mind a scrap.’
‘You were as white as a sheet. I thought you were going to howl.’
I did not swear as some of the boys in the form habitually did; I had been too finically brought up. But at that moment all my pain, anger, and temper exploded in a screaming oath.
Jack Cotery was taken aback. ‘Keep your shirt on,’ he said.
On the way to the tram stop, where we travelled in different directions, he could not resist asking me: ‘Is your old man in debt, really?’
‘In a way,’ I said, trying to shield the facts, not to tell an actual lie – wanting both to mystify and to hide my own misery. ‘In a way. It’s all very complicated, it’s a matter of – petitions.’ I added, as impressively as I could, ‘It’s been in the solicitor’s hands.’
‘I’m glad mine’s all right,’ said Jack Cotery, impressive in his turn. ‘Of course, I could have brought a lot more money this morning. My old man is making plenty, though he doesn’t always let on. He’d have given me a
pound
if I’d asked him. But’ – Jack Cotery whispered and his eyes glowed – ‘I’m keeping it in reserve for something else.’
When I arrived home, my mother was waiting for me with an eager question.
‘What did they think of your subscription, dear?’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Did anyone give more than ten shillings?’
‘No. Not in our form.’
My mother drew herself up and nodded her head: ‘Was ours the highest?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘What was the next highest?’
‘Five shillings,’ I said.
‘Twice as much,’ said my mother, smiling and gratified. But she was perceptive; she had an inkling of something wrong.
‘What did they
say
, though, dear?’
‘They thanked me, of course.’
‘Who was the master who took it?’ she asked.
‘Mr Peck.’
‘Was he pleased with you?’
‘Of course he was,’ I said flatly.
‘I want to hear everything he said,’ said my mother, half in vanity, half trying to reach my trouble.
‘I can’t now, Mother. I want to get back early. I’ll tell you everything tonight.’
‘I don’t think that’s very grateful of you,’ said my mother. ‘Considering what I did to find you all that money. Don’t you think I deserve to be told all about it now?’
‘I’ll tell you everything tonight.’
‘Please not to worry yourself if it’s too much trouble,’ she said haughtily, feeling that I was denying her love.
‘It’s not too much trouble, Mother. I’ll tell you tonight,’ I said, not knowing which way to turn.
I did not go straight home from school that evening. Instead, I walked by myself a long way round by the canal; the mist was rising, as fresh and clean as that morning’s mist; but as it swirled round the bridges and warehouses and the trees by the waterside, it no longer exalted me. I was inventing a story, walking that long way home through the mist, which would content my mother. Of how Mr Peck had said my contribution was an example to the form, of how he had told other masters, of how someone said that my parents were public-spirited. I composed suitable speeches. I had enough sense of reality to make them sound plausible, and to add one or two disparaging remarks from envious form-mates.
I duly repeated that fiction to my mother. Nothing could remove her disappointment. She had thought me inconsiderate and heartless, and now, if she believed at all, she felt puzzled, cast-off, and only a little flattered. I thought that I was romancing simply to save her from a bitter degradation. Yet I should have brought her more love if I had told her the truth. It would have been more loving to let her take an equal share in that day’s suffering. That lie showed the flaw between us.
There were nights that autumn, however, when my mother and I were closer than we had ever been. They were the nights when she tried to learn French. She saw me with my first French grammar, and she was seized with a desire to follow my lessons. French to her was romantic, genteel, emblem and symbol of the existence she had so much coveted. Her bold, handsome eyes were bright each time we spread the books on the front-room table. Her health was getting worse, she was having frightening fits of giddiness, but her interest and nervous gusto and hope pressed her on as when she was a girl.
‘Time for my French lesson,’ she said eagerly when Saturday evening came round. We started after tea and she was downcast if I would not persevere for a couple of hours. Often on those Saturday nights the autumn gales lashed rain against the windows; to that accompaniment, my mother tried to repeat my secondary-school phonetics.
Actually, she found my attempts to retail the phonetic lessons quite impossible to imitate. She learned entirely by eye, and was comfortable when she could pronounce the words exactly as in English. But she learned quickly and accurately by eye, as I did myself. Soon she could translate the simple sentences in my reader. It gave her a transfiguring pleasure; she held my hand, and translated one sentence after another. ‘Is that right? Is that right?’ she cried wildly and happily, and laughed at me. ‘You’re not ashamed of your pupil, are you, dear?’
I buried deep the claims my mother made on me and which I could not meet. I could forget them more easily because, in my successes at school, I provided her, for the only time for years, with something actual for her hopes to feed on. She still read the cards and teacups, she had taken to entering for several competitions a week in
Answers
and
John Bull
, but when she studied my terminal reports, she felt this was her solitary promise for the future. As soon as she had received one and read it through, she put it in her bag, changed into her best dress, and, pointing her toes, set off in dignity for Aunt Milly, the doctor, and the vicar.
When I took the Senior Oxford, I gave her something more to flaunt. My last term at school was over and I waited for the result. It was the brilliant summer of 1921, and one night I came home after baking all day at the county ground. As I came up our street in the hot and thundery evenings I saw my mother and brother waving to me from the window.
My mother opened the door herself. She was displaying the evening paper. She looked flushed and well, her eyes were flashing, although she had had a heart attack that summer.
‘Do you know, dear?’ she cried.
‘No. Is it–?’
‘Then let me be the first to congratulate you,’ she said with a grand gesture. ‘You couldn’t have done better. It’s impossible for you to have done better!’
It was her way, her romantic and superb way, of saying that my name appeared in the first class. She was exultant. My name was alone! – she was light-headed with triumph. I was recklessly joyful, but each time I caught my mother’s eye I felt I had never seen such triumph. She had none of the depression of anticlimax that chases after a success; she had looked forward to this moment, one of many moments to come, and her spirit was strong enough to exult without a single qualm.
My mother at once sent my young brother out for foods that we could not usually afford. She intended to have a glorious supper – not that she could eat much nowadays, but for the sake of style and for my sake. My father had, a year past, ceased to be a traveller and had moved back to ‘Mr Stapleton’s’ as a cashier at four pounds a week. He was competent at paperwork, but my mother ground the aching tooth and told herself that it was shameful to return to such a job when he had been second-in-command, that the job was just a bone thrown in contemptuous friendliness and charity. Thus, with the fall in the value of money, our meals were not as lavish as they had been even immediately after my father’s bankruptcy. Even so, my mother never lost her taste for the extravagant. She still paid each bill on Saturday morning; but if luxuries were required for a state occasion, such as that night, luxuries were bought, though it meant going hungry for the rest of the week.
That night we ate a melon and some boiled salmon and éclairs and meringues and
millefeuilles
. My mother’s triumph would have been increased if she could have had Aunt Milly there to gloat over; but she could not have Aunt Milly as well as a glass of wine, and my mother’s sense of fitness would not be satisfied without wine on the table; she wanted to fill the wine glasses which she had received as a wedding present and which were not used more than once a year. So young Martin had been sent on another errand to the grocer, and the glasses were filled with tawny port.
My father, who had changed not at all in the last seven years, kept saying, ‘Well, I didn’t pass the examination. But I can dispose of the supper as well as anyone,’ and ate away with his usual mild but hearty content. My mother was too borne up to say more than, ‘Bertie, don’t be such a donkey’. She took her share of the meal, which nowadays she rarely did, and several glasses of wine. More than once she put up her spectacles to her long-sighted eyes and read the announcement again. ‘No one in the same division!’ she cried. ‘It will give them all something to think about!’ She decided that she must have two dozen copies of the paper to send to friends and relatives, and ordered Martin to make sure and go to the newsagents first thing next morning.
My mother talked to me across the supper table.
‘I always told you to make your way,’ she said. The room was gilded in the sunset, and she raised a hand to shield her eyes. ‘I want you to remember that, No one else told you that, did they?’
She was illuminated with triumph and her glasses of wine, but she asked insistently.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No one else at all did they?’
‘Of course not, Mother,’ I said.
‘I don’t expect you to be satisfied now,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot to do. You’ve got a long way to go. You remember all you’ve promised me, don’t you?’
It turned out, almost at once, very easy not to be satisfied. For I was faced with the choice of my first job. When the examination result came out, I had actually left school, although we had put off the question of my job. And now my mother and I conferred. What was I to do? We had no one to give us accurate information, let alone advice. No boy at the school had ever taken a scholarship to the university; those masters who had degrees had taken them externally through London and Dublin. None of them knew his way about. One or two, wanting to help me, suggested that I might stay at school and then go to a teacher’s training college. It meant real hardship to my mother unless I earned some money at once; not that she would have minded such hardship – she would have cherished it, if her imagination had been caught – but she resented stinting us all for years so that I might in the end become an elementary school teacher.
My mother found no more help in the parish. This was the
vie de province
, the life of a submerged and suburban province. The new vicar, though even ‘higher’, was less cultivated than the old one. The doctor had lived in the district all his life, except when he was struggling his way through a London hospital and the conjoint; from his excessive awe at my passing an examination, I suspected that he had had trouble with his own. He knew the parish like the palm of his hand, but he was quite ignorant of the world outside. He could suggest nothing for me. Perhaps he was anxious to take no responsibility, for my mother, given the slightest lead, would not have refused to let him set me going. My mother had always believed that if I showed promise Dr Francis would interest himself practically in my career. But Dr Francis was a wary old bird.
Aunt Milly took it into her head that I ought to become an engineer. She first of all pointed out that, though I might have done better than anyone from the local schools, no doubt plenty of boys in other places had achieved the same result. Then, in her energetic fashion, she went off, without getting my mother’s agreement or mine, and plunged into discussions with some of her father’s acquaintances at the tram depot. She obtained some opinions which later I realized were entirely sensible, It would be necessary for me to become a trade apprentice: that meant five years in the works, and working at the technical college at night; it would be easy to get taken as an apprentice by one of the town’s big engineering firms. Aunt Milly produced these views with vigorous satisfaction. She felt, as usual, confident that she had done the right thing and that this was the only conceivable course for me. She overlooked two factors. One, that my mother was shocked to the marrow of her bones by the thought that I should become for years what seemed to her nothing but a manual worker. Two, that there was almost no occupation which I should have liked less or been more completely unfitted for. Aunt Milly left the house in a huff, and it was apparent that we could expect no further aid from her.
That aggravated our distress, for up to now my mother had always known that she had Aunt Milly as an ultimate reserve, in the very long run. It was only a few days afterwards, when I had begun answering advertisements in the local paper, that I received a letter from my headmaster. If I was not fitted with what he called a ‘post’, would I go to see him? At once my mother’s romantic hope surged up. Perhaps the school had some funds to give me a grant, perhaps after all they would manage to send me to a university – for, learning from the handbooks on careers that I had discovered, my mother now saw a university as our Promised Land.
In brutal fact, the offer was a different one. The education office in the town hall had asked the school to recommend someone as a junior clerk. It was the kind of job much coveted among my companions – the headmaster was giving the first refusal, as a kind of prize. The pay was a pound a week until seventeen and then went up by five shillings a week each year, until one reached three pounds, the top of the scale. It was a perfectly safe job; there were prospects of going reasonably high in the local government offices, perhaps to a divisional chief at four hundred and fifty pounds a year. There was, of course, a pension. The headmaster strongly advised me to take it. He had himself begun as an elementary schoolteacher in the town, had acquired a Dublin degree, and when our school had been promoted to secondary status he had had his one great piece of luck. He was a full-blooded and virile man, but he was hardened to his pupils having to scrape their way.