Читать книгу Richard Temple - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 6

Plunging back into these unfrequented memories was something like opening his eyes under water, or coming from a brilliant restaurant into a black street with unconnected lights of varying brilliance in it: quite apart from his ‘professional’ detachment from himself, he had never been a wanderer in the past. He had always lived minute by minute, in the present – a vivid life, in happiness or misery, like an animal’s – and perhaps it was for this reason that he had so little sense of order in time.

In this first period of hesitation, this question of where to begin, a variety of images presented themselves like glowing balloons that he could reach out for as he chose; and presently he chose one that contained the shape and the colours of his first own room.

For it was himself as a child that he could remember best, or best recall: there was no difficulty in that backward jump of twenty years or more, nothing alien in that small body and more rounded face. He had been a commonplace and stupid little boy, but in many ways he was a better person then and certainly a more agreeable one to himself than he had ever been since. In spite of his somewhat thievish and mendacious disposition he had, like most other children, a very delicate sense of honour; and in those days he had a great deal of affection in his heart, affection for the asking. His emotions were brilliant, wholehearted and direct: and unless he had some positive cause for sorrow, he was happy most of the time. It is true that punishment often came between him and happiness; yet not all punishment succeeded – far from it, for most of it, after the traditional beating, was imprisonment: ‘Richard, go to your room.’ He had an excellent temperament for that mild confinement, a solitary, idle and unfretting mind; and there was never a pleasanter place of apprenticeship than this room in Plimpton rectory.

There were thirty-nine bands of lyres and roses on the wall that ran from the door to the window. You could imagine them as the conventional bars of a gaol or the magnified wires of a bird-cage: they could also be seen as an abacus and a calendar. They were strips that his mother had pasted over the old, unsatisfactory blue-grey background for his birthday; the old background had frustrated him for as long as he could remember, with its foolish pattern of vague trellises that did not meet at the joints, and thus became doubly meaningless; but the strips had changed all this. Lyres and roses, and the roses were a lovely roughened crimson. The roses and the yellow lyres, which were entwined with the roses’ leaves, formed a continuous pattern of whorls, now this way and now that; and yet as well as the pattern each rose and each stringed lyre was a thing in itself. In the first band there were forty-eight roses and forty-seven lyres: this treacherous difference put the calculation of the whole number beyond his powers, for although he delighted in a certain superstitious or perhaps numinous aspect of number he was useless with sums, and in this case he was reduced to counting, one by one. Not that this was any hardship: he spent hours and happy hours in plodding up and down the rows. These were often hours of imprisonment, when he was supposed to be deprived of the pleasure of running about and playing in the open. They did not seem to know that he never ran about voluntarily, at least not when he was alone, as he always was in the holidays; nor that he was utterly indifferent to the countryside – he could not tell a blackbird from a rook, and did not care. In intervals of drawing he was happiest (when he was at liberty) in mooning vaguely, counting his slow, lethargic steps in the disused stable-yard, carefully walking on the cracks, or staring for a pattern or a face in the crazed roughcast of the wall. So although a kind of sharpness rare in him had early warned him to feign reluctance to ‘go up to your room’, he had in fact often been charmed to renew the spell of slow, timeless incantation by counting. It was a room that faced the west, and often his mild vacancy was illuminated by the golden warmth of the declining sun: the wallpaper, the room and that splendid light were intimately linked in his mind – it was the recollection of delight.

And yet it was not always so delightful. He remembered a cold grey morning there: but before he let his recollection go to reinhabit that time and place he made an effort to find out its date. It must have been a Monday, and the first Monday of the holidays. Probably the Easter holidays of his last year at his preparatory school. Certainly it must have been at the beginning of the holidays, because there was the misery of the school report in its long envelope hanging over him; and it must have been a Monday, for there had been no punishment, no recrimination the day before. School had broken up at the end of the week, and he could remember the extraordinarily enhanced feeling of liberty when he came home and found that his father was away, and that he would have his mother to himself until Sunday, a closed season. But Sunday attitudes could never last, and on Monday morning he was told to go up to his room. ‘Richard, go up to your room.’

It would be a wretched report, he knew; but he was only nineteenth in twenty-three, which was an improvement, and if they reproached him with smashing the wash-stand he could point to his drawing prize. But he felt nervous and cold; he wished it all over. He began to count off the days of the holiday, starting from the rose that marked the present date. The progression of weeks ran up and up, and on a Wednesday just before the beginning of the term they ran under a picture, to emerge on Thursday week. This picture was a little water-colour of Colpoys rectory, where his mother had been born; he had never been there, but he knew it exceedingly well from his mother’s descriptions of her life there, and he could go confidently through the door under the Regency porch and know that if he went along the hall to the left of the stairs he would come to a door that led into a walled garden with a peacock in it. He was standing on an immense stretch of lawn running his finger down the iridescent sheen of the kind peacock’s throat when the sound of a door opening below made him jerk. His father was still talking backwards into the room, ‘…, it is no use arguing, Laura. We must have it out in the open.’ And then, loudly, up the stairs, ‘Richard.’

He hurried down, his face composed in an expression of dutiful worry, and stood lumpishly in the accepted place, on the edge of the black hairy rug. It was a brown room, yet cold, and the two north-facing windows on his left, with their lower panes covered with translucent paper lozenges, gave on to a scraped grass-plot. One was further obscured by a monkey-puzzle tree made of blue-black metal, but in the light of it his mother was sitting in a wicker chair, pretending to sew: she did not catch his eye.

His father enjoyed the due procedure of these court scenes, and it would be some time before the indictment began. Richard felt uneasy and low; but it was a situation that he could cope with – he did not feel desperate.

But then Mr Temple said, ‘Have you seen this before, Richard?’ and the bottom of his world fell out.

It was a pound note, with the houses of parliament on one side and the grave, bearded king on the other. He had taken it so long ago that he had forgotten it entirely, but in that moment the thrill and terror came back to him, and the impossibility of returning it to the Melanesian box, and the hiding-place under the board.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Richard, dear,’ said his mother anxiously; but she had joined the enemy and he had nothing to say to her – would not look in her direction.

The anger was battering around his bowed pale sullen head. It went on and on, booming, growing hotter in the face of dumb opposition, stupid opposition (he was too overwhelmed for any intelligent defence even if it had been possible), refusal to negotiate. He heard the creak of the wicker chair and his mother went quickly out of the room.

In his own place again he passed down through the stages until he reached the point where the reality of his sobs had gone, and although his face was still the face of a child crying, mouth open, eyes screwed up and breath checking in his throat and stomach, there were no more tears and in fact as he leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window he had already begun talking to himself, although it was in a low, discouraged way.

Downstairs they were quarrelling: not that he could hear any words, but he was quite certain of it. It is impossible to say how he knew. It was certainly not through listening behind doors, for his mother had let him know that eavesdropping was dishonourable and he would have gone to great lengths to avoid it; but he knew it as completely as he knew that his parents did not like one another and that their united front was a kind of pious, necessary fiction, and that she was really on his side against a common enemy. He had gained none of this knowledge directly from her: he had only seen her once or twice, walking up and down behind the house alone after a disagreement, with her mouth compressed into a hard line and the look of an utter stranger on her face: it had terrified him, infinitely more than his father’s rages. From this and from those thousands of minute shades of meaning and silences and changes of atmosphere that even the dullest child is aware of, he had reached a fair understanding of the case quite early in his life.

His father, Llewellyn Temple, was an unfortunate man who had succeeded in his early, inexplicable ambition to become a parson: he was of shop-keeping Liverpool-Welsh background, and without the help of any connection, liberal education or apparent vocation he had come to be ordained; and as a curate he had appeared at Colpoys rectory just at the time when Laura, Richard’s mother, was in that unsettled, discontented state of agitation in which she would have married a mandrill if he had asked her – her sister Alice, seven years younger, had had her wedding that Easter; the lonely countryside was bare of suitable unmarried men; she was a pretty, high-spirited, highly-sexed woman who would be thirty in November.

The marriage and the interest of his father-in-law had procured Mr Temple the living of Plimpton, and to the day of his death (which happened not long after, when Richard was thirteen) he thought highly of himself for this advancement. But it did not bring him much happiness: even if he had been capable of much, Plimpton would not have brought it, for the place was quite unsuitable for him, and he was quite unsuitable for the place. It was in the deep country, the profoundly conservative and Tory country (Mr Temple was a Liberal and a passionate admirer of Lloyd George): the living was poor; the parishioners were used to a parson with private means and they detested anything new-fangled, such as democracy or enthusiasm. The rectory was isolated – no neighbours except the Hall – and more than usually inconvenient; it had no running water, no electricity, no gas.

Poor man, he was unhappy, and his unhappiness engendered more all round him: he certainly made his wife very unhappy, and she, heaping all her resentment of his coarseness, insensitivity, sexual inadequacy and increasing bad temper upon his Welsh background, made a very unpleasant symbol indeed of the poor Principality.

Richard caught the sense of this, of course – how could he escape it? – but it was not until he was coming along towards adolescence that he began to set it against a wider field of experience, the world outside the house, and to apply it to himself personally. It was a time of elections, and Lloyd George was touring the country: in the opinion of the Hall and of almost everybody else in the vicinity Lloyd George was a hateful person, untrustworthy and unscrupulous, envious, mean and glib; he was a dirty little Welshman, a vulgar, jumped-up attorney overflowing with jealousy and spite, bent on England’s ruin. A common little man: the final damnation. He was Welsh and he was common. Yet Richard’s father was a Welshman: and Richard was his father’s son. Was there some unavoidable taint in this? Or did he perhaps belong to his mother’s side?

He had always assumed that in the nature of things he was one of the better sort – he would have flung a handful of gold to the respectful peasantry before galloping on to the aid of the king. It was an assumption that he hardly questioned openly, for he was feeling little more than a hint of the immense force of English social pressures and he had only a vague suspicion about how they were to impinge upon him, only the most cloudy doubts about where he fitted in. He scarcely questioned the assumption; but now he would be glad to be confirmed in it, for underlying all this there was the remotely glimpsed possibility that he might be found to belong to the other side, that his mother might learn of this and cast him off.

And then what constituted a gentleman? He had always thought he knew – perfectly obvious – but as he grew older and more concerned he found that the manifold definitions that he had somehow acquired were often contradictory. He was a candid little boy, with remarkably little social sense, and he did not know how to distinguish the cant and the half-cant from the facts. Gentlemen were both good and bad, it seemed, pure and rakish; they were always polite and well-bred, yet look at old Mr Holden of the Hall, to say nothing of Henry VIII. Gentility had nothing to do with wealth, they said: but did it not? Amos came to do the heavy digging on odd days, and when he was preparing the big square bed he came across one strangely shaped seed-potato among the King Edwards that he was setting. ‘That’s an ash-leaf,’ he said, showing it to Richard. ‘It won’t give you but four or five to one. A real gentleman’s potato,’ he added, in a respectful tone.

Somewhere in the present world there was a shuddering noise, a crepitation: could it have been gunfire, or a bomb? But it was not repeated and it only made the slightest check in his meditation, scarcely enough to change the current of his thoughts.

In a few moments his faint questioning had died away; he was back again, and he was remembering school – school, and how he had asked Gay about these things. In this case his visual image was so luminous and strong that if there had been a calendar on the wall of the room he saw he would have read the date: but in fact he could place this time exactly in time, because it was the term before the scholarship fiasco, and the very first day of that term, to be precise.

The first day of term, and yet the place had just the same atmosphere as if the school had never been closed – the ammoniac smell of little boys, the taste and feeling of chalk and dust, the combined odours of deal, ink, school-books and coke. It was a comforting atmosphere, for although the last day of the holidays had been sad, conventionally sad, it had been a holiday particularly full of domestic unpleasantness and punishment, and the old unchanging world of school had been very welcome to him, especially now that he was one of the big boys, in the headmaster’s form and beyond the reach of any tyranny. Yet he had not been in the place more than a few hours before change and impermanence showed themselves and dispelled the warmth. The headmaster sent for him and said, ‘Well, Richard, and how did you leave your father and mother?’

‘Very well, thank you, sir,’ said Richard, and the old gentleman gazed at him for some minutes. Mr Fielding was an old friend of his mother’s father; he was indeed one of Mrs Temple’s very few relatives, though exceedingly remote, and he had known her all his life. He was educating Richard for nothing (not that Richard knew this) and when he was speaking in a private, unofficial capacity he called him by his Christian name; Richard was therefore surprised and aggrieved when the headmaster went on, ‘You know, my dear boy, your mother is very worried about your chances of a scholarship. I told her that I had got stupider boys through; but I was obliged to add that your chances were by no means as good as we could wish.’

These words provided him with three very disagreeable reflections at once: the first brought into his unwilling mind the fact that the comfortable everlasting world of school would have an end – that it might go on, but not with him, who must leave quite soon; the second, that his progress to a public school (which he preferred to leave in the vagueness of a remote future) was neither automatic nor certain; and the third, the least important, that he would be compelled to work much harder.

‘Why are you looking so mumchance?’ asked Gay.

‘You must realise that Latin, not drawing or French, is the key to a scholarship,’ said Richard, in an imitation of Mr Fielding’s voice, as he plucked his books from the desk in the quietest corner at the back where they had elected to sit together. ‘I am to go up in front,’ he said, with much resentment, ‘and am to stay in on Wednesdays to do Common Entrance papers. It’s all’ – (lowering his voice a little, for he was speaking of a great man) – ‘ballocks.’

Of course it was all ballocks, he asserted: anyone could get a sons-of-clergy closed scholarship. Gill had got one, and Gill notoriously wetted his bed – Gill had warts. Besides, everybody went to a public school: it was part of the process and nothing else was thinkable. Most would try for scholarships: Gay was going in for a Winchester scholarship; but he would go there, whether he got it or not. Only cads went to common schools – indeed, they were called cads’ schools.

It was absurd to think of Gay failing, or Gay’s friends, for that matter: Gay was one of those naturally fortunate creatures who never fail. He had bright blue eyes in a round and jolly face, and he did not give a damn for anything. He could have been one of the chief bloods of the school if he had chosen, but he was not at all competitive, and he would not take even cricket seriously. Even so, he remained one of the most popular boys there, and Richard was lucky to have him as a particular friend; for Richard was not a popular boy. Perhaps no boy is ever much liked unless his values are just the same as those of his contemporaries and unless he has the same sense of tact, which Richard had not. There was a curious piece of iron, for example, that lay on a shelf in the hall; one day Richard took it, because he had always coveted its spiny shape. He showed it to his friends, but after some initial excitement they had hesitated and then they had withdrawn their moral support. Many things could be taken, such as elastic bands and things from the laboratory, but somehow meteorites were not among them and they all knew it, except Richard. There were many things like that that he got just wrong. But his unpopularity, at its worst, was never more than a mild unpopularity, being mitigated by his good looks and his courage: he was far more aggressive than Gay, and it would not do to meddle with him. Most little boys are cowards, and when they fight it is upon the tacit understanding that neither will go too far; but Richard could not be relied upon to keep in bounds.

He and Gay had always got along well together, but it was only in the last year that they had been such close friends, drawn together, it must be admitted, by the abominable vice of sodomy. Gay very much admired Richard’s talent for drawing, and Richard had illustrated most of his books: Richard also made drawings for Gay’s primitive, mediæval jokes – some few of them were clean, but Gay’s mind was very like a sink, and most of them had to circulate under double oaths of secrecy. Not that Gay was exceptional in this; Grafton was a rather dirty school at that time, and it was not particularly Gay’s influence that had turned the top form into a little suburb of Sodom – a cheerful and unselfconscious Sodom, however, for it was an unusually happy school.

It was from Gay, too, that Richard had caught the habit of reading. But it was unfortunate for Richard that Kipling should have been Gay’s favourite author, for Kipling’s curious image of the world was not the most reassuring one for him. To enjoy Kipling you need a strong stomach, a certainty of the Herrenvolk’s existence, and an unshaken conviction that you belong to it.

And Gay had always been a fount of worldly knowledge. Long before this, when they were both little boys in the lowest form, he had been able to give Richard some idea of what was the thing in that particular community: in the kindest way he had said, ‘You don’t want to be a blooming arse with your French, you know, going on like a foreigner. The chaps are laughing at you.’ Laura Temple had been educated at Lausanne; she spoke beautiful French and had taught Richard very early and very well, but even after he had been at school for some time he had still not grasped the atmosphere of the place better than to go on angering Mr Frisby and the rest of the class with this odious perfection.

Richard would never make such a gaffe now – he was too well attuned, at last, to the feelings of the upper school – but Gay remained his authority for nearly all matters outside it. Gay could explain books; Gay could explain dark passages. And yet in this relationship there was no striving for place, no first and second fiddle; it was a singularly sweet mutual liking, and the wearisome domination that is part of so many adult friendships was not there at all. They could speak to one another openly, with an ingenuous lack of dignity that would never come again.

When Gay had helped him move his books they went out to a place beyond the cricket pitches called Starve-Acre, where they had the habit of sitting upon a bank in the evening sun. Richard was carving a lump of chalk into the likeness of the school porter while Gay told him of the events in his holidays, which were always filled with parties, picnics, excursions and so on, because he had a large family and his people lived in a thickly-populated part of the country – and because they were rich. Richard was deeply engrossed with the porter’s ear, but through it he heard Gay’s spirited imitation of his aunt, shrieking in a cross falsetto, ‘… a dreadfully vulgar man in a screaming bookie’s suit.’

‘But wasn’t that Brown’s father?’ asked Richard.

‘Yes. But she didn’t know it at first. Then she did.’

‘She didn’t mean he was really common?’

‘Of course she did. He is, too.’

‘But he’s a colonel.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Can officers be common, Gay?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Gay, with conviction. ‘There are some rotten regiments, who just get the dregs …’

He went on; but Richard, half listening and half reflecting, found that one of the props of his tentative system, that of gentility by office, was giving way. Gay was going on from the Army Service Corps and the like to bodies of his own invention, such as the Brothel Corps, and he was enjoying his own wit to a high degree when Richard interrupted him and said confidentially, ‘But I say, Gay, that’s not the same for parsons, is it?’

‘Oh no,’ said Gay, as earnestly as he could manage, ‘parsons are always all right, I dare say.’