The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy Page 9

  Rousing at last I found myself lying in the sickroom. I was suffering not only from concussion but from suspected pneumonia of the right lung. The headmaster came to look at me, so I knew I must be pretty bad. North Malverton won by five wickets.

  Sister Virginia Traven wore a white nursing coat when she was on duty at school. Beneath it, she liked the things in which I had seen her during the holidays, clothes that women liked at that time, a fawn woollen sweater, beneath which the gentle contours of her breasts could barely be distinguished (but I could distinguish them without any trouble), and a tweedy skirt. Over the sweater she wore either a jacket that matched the skirt or a rather shabby green suède jacket that bore a Stockholm name-tab inside. Her stockings and her shoes, which were soft, tan and ‘sensible’, had no particular distinguishing mark. Her outfit was, I suppose, almost exactly what was worn by thousands of women of her class; but for me they carried something of the glamour and mystery of her elusive nature. I could have identified them as hers among a parade of a thousand garments, so firmly had I fixed their every particular feature upon my brain. To come across her jacket lying discarded across the back of a chair was to experience a great feeling of poignance, of love, and of loss.

  She was there unobtrusively in the sickroom that afternoon when I came to. She took my temperature and my pulse, standing by the bed. Later, she sat by me while the maid, Bovis, brought me a cup of tea. Inside my beating head everything external was remote, but her stillness came through to me.

  Awful though I felt – I had a high temperature – I was full of light. I had been delivered into her hands. This was her lair, and she was in sole charge of me! Early in the summer term the sickroom was empty; no snivelling cases of flu or pink-eye, none of the mastoid cases of winter or the measles cases of spring. Just the bare room with flowers on the deep window-sill, while the other beds, hard as iron, created neat geometrical patterns round the walls.

  As for its single occupant, I was something of a hero. I had gone on to the field against Malverton with pneumonia! The code of Branwells, ambivalent to suffering as to pleasure, decided it approved. A coal fire was lit in my room, although the weather was so fine. Bovis laid it and ceremoniously set light to it.

  Fever made my first whole day’s stay in the sickroom almost infinitely long. Lying and fretfully listening, the knock of bat against ball reached me from evening nets practice. The air was heavily pink with dusk as Sister made her last rounds and Bovis brought me soup I did not want.

  When Sister had gone, when the great school began to settle down for the night, and one by one the whistling and stamping in the corridors and the sounds echoing in the quad died into the dark, I was left alone with my larking temperature. Hauling myself out of bed, I looked through the window at the quad, deserted now except for a master crossing it, smoking a pipe, carrying a couple of books under his arm. The school machine was functioning perfectly without me – I, who might make head prefect next term. As I realized how unimportant I was, an old loneliness crept back, and I began to howl for comfort.

  I howled for Esmeralda. In her arms I had had most comfort.

  Sister’s room was situated above the sickroom. She heard my cries and came down, shining a torch. Her familiar clothes had gone; she was no longer in uniform; she wore nightdress and dressing-gown. Perhaps I had been crumpled on the end of my bed longer than I thought; perhaps I had howled less loudly and sustainedly than I imagined – under the fever, my senses were distorted. Her first words to me were, ‘Hush, it’s gone midnight! Everyone’s asleep!’

  Strange and thrilling words, quite conspiratorial!

  She came up to me, felt my brow. I immediately clung to her. She was small and light, and was easily pulled on to the bed. I embraced her. Now I was crying, she was whispering excitedly to me.

  That first love-making was a strange mixture of childish and adult fantasy – on both sides, no doubt. Virginia was partly mother-figure to me, and all the sweeter for that; while, at the same time, this was the first occasion on which I loved anyone, rather than simply rubbing genitals. I loved Virginia. I uncovered her little breasts and smothered them with wet kisses, I pulled back her flimsy clothes, I felt the beloved moisture between her narrow thighs, and we were united without effort. We lay side by side, rocking each other. It was all revelation!

  She seemed to be whispering all the time; through the fever, I could not seem to register what she was saying. She called me by a strange loving name. And she needed me. Her need for me caught me unexpectedly, like a big wave, bathing me, lifting me. The vast stone school rose and circled round our heads. By the fugitive firelight, we were visible to each other only as amorphous shapes, my mythic lover and I.

  Afterwards we lay there for a long time. My hand stroked her hair.

  Finally, Virginia sat up. ‘Virgin for short but not for long.’ Modestly, she adjusted her clothes and set her hair right. I could make out that she was smiling at me, just as I lay beaming at her.

  Many curious things occur to one that are almost beyond language to express. I have always liked women and been curious about them, possibly because my mother’s temperament led me never to trust them entirely. With unidentified senses, I have always known a great deal about them, even when my experience of them was almost nil.

  What I knew about Virginia may be put in one sentence: I knew that she was an intricate person, and yet with her goodness never far from the surface, and that in some way she had been deeply hurt, possibly beyond hope of redress. This intuitive knowledge illuminated her every gesture and word, investing them with an individual character, just as her clothes were invested with character.

  This discovery that I could know women intimately (without allowing me to encroach on their privacy, for that my shyness did not allow) I insert here all too bluntly. At first, it seemed such a nebulous thing that I dared not trust it; only much later did I examine it carefully and find it not to be a beautiful delusion. But it must find a place here because I fell in love with darling Virginia, and that intuitive knowledge of something she could never tell me was one of the prime happy things then granted me.

  Happily, self-reproach does not play a great part in my nature. My faults were early brought home to me; I have never lost them, or my deleterious habits. Yet they have never weighed too heavily because of my intimate knowledge that faults and weaknesses are essential components of everyone’s nature. Perfection is only a pose of weakness.

  This knowledge has permitted me to write as frankly as I have done here. It’s a boyhood I describe, not a case history; to many who will not care to say so, my experiences will awaken resonances.

  All I regret are my literary flaws, which will not permit me to relive here those early years. All I can do is to re-tell them, as honestly as possible, from the standpoint of age and memory.

  Only at this point will I admit how inadequate my talent is to breathe life again into – to resurrect – that dear occasion when Virginia and I were complete and, for an indefinite span, all-in-all to one another.

  ‘Now I’d better get my patient a cup of tea,’ she said. Whatever she said was invested with a peculiar charm, a sort of irony, a sort of semi-official … no, I can’t describe it. It was not so much that she did not take herself or me or the world quite seriously, rather that she had a not-quite-serious policy to take nothing seriously.

  Glutton that I was, as she started to leave the bed I reached out for her again.

  ‘You’re really very ill,’ she said. But of course I was sure I would never in my life get her on the bed again.

  Happily, it did not work out that way. Like the great A. K. Dancer before me, I had found love. Though it was still to be brought home to me that love, like everything else, has its flaws and weaknesses.

  If it had been left to me, then, knowing no better, I would no doubt have conducted it as an affair of organs. But Virginia gently and slyly directed the affair on another course. She was not averse to sexual intercourse, but
she insisted on social intercourse as well.

  I was in the sickroom under her care and tutelage for fifteen days, fifteen flowering days. Not for ten years, until I made my wretched marriage, was I again to enjoy the company of a woman so exclusively and so continuously. In that time, without intending to, Virginia set her frail stamp upon me.

  In that time the world stopped – though, in the last week, I had my school books and did some studying during the day. My friends came to see me and uttered rude and envious comments, at which I laughed and made coarse jokes back: made them against Virginia, lacerating myself as I did so, in order that these uncouth sods, my chums, should not guess what was really happening.

  One of them, a heavy-faced boy called Spaldine who came from Spalding and was also in the art club, was particularly pressing. I knew he fancied Virginia himself.

  ‘You must at least have had a bit on a finger from her,’ he said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, you know I’d like to just as much as you would, Spaldine, you bastard, but if anyone touched her she’d go straight to the Head, and I’d be sacked before I knew it.’

  ‘Go on, it would be worth it!’ Spaldine said.

  And they would leave, and my mysterious lover, twice my age, would come with her rapid walk into the room seeming to behave for a moment as if our relationship was merely a formal one – as if she were perhaps as surprised by everything as I.

  In the afternoons I was allowed to go up to her room, normally out of bounds, and sit on the sofa with her and even smoke a secret cigarette with her. We talked as equals. She liked to affect a drawl and speak very cynically, telling me amusing and sometimes risqué stories of her family, all of whom did interesting things. About herself she was more reticent.

  The novelty and enchantment of all this filled every last corner of my life. I thought of her every moment I was awake, whether she was present or not; and she permeated my sleep, even when I did not dream of her.

  Virginia’s only drawback was that she was not as lecherous as I. Except for one occasion, she would not make love with me in the daytime. Evenings and nights, she said, were made for loving: bodies, becoming part of the darkness, were more sensuous then. I laughed and asked if her old Zulu had taught her that, but she said it was true. Perhaps it is.

  Coupled with this belief of hers went a strong aversion to letting me see any part of her body unclothed. Her body, she said, was her secret; no one had ever seen it since she was grown up. Only after dark could I feel it and kiss it, and then in carefully circumscribed areas. She liked having her breasts kissed, but that was about the limit.

  There was nothing wrong with her body; I could feel no scars. Recalling my secret knowledge that she had in some way been badly hurt, I asked her what unpleasant things had happened in her life.

  ‘Nothing unpleasant ever happens to good girls, Horatio, darling.’

  Later, however, she admitted that when her family had been living in Hong Kong, when she was a small girl and her father was stationed there, she had caught rheumatic fever, and only the extreme devotion of her mother’s nursing had saved her.

  Every night at midnight she came down to my bed in the sickroom. I argued that we would be safer from discovery in her room, for the duty master occasionally took it into his head to wander through the whole school; in addition, I wanted to savour for the first time the glamour of a female bed; but Virginia said that in the sickroom she could hear anyone coming in time to pretend she was simply on duty, whereas if we were up in her room, and my bed was found unoccupied, there would be a great row! So we lay together in love every time where we had first lain, and the thought that we could be caught perhaps added flavour to our happiness – for in some respects we were neither of us entirely unlike children playing a role.

  Eventually, that role could be played on that stage no longer. My form master came to see Sister and asked pressingly that I be returned to school as soon as possible. I had to go. By this time I was perfectly fit, and Virginia was sending me out for long walks every day.

  She had to sign me off, and I had to return to the school that had been waiting, sunlit, noisy, dusty, in the wings all this halcyon time. But she insisted that I was excused sport for another week and should continue to take my walks during that period.

  Twice during those walks she met me at a prearranged spot. On one occasion she and I walked to Youlgreave and had hot toasted tea-cake and big cups of tea in a little whitewashed cottage that was still there, standing empty, during the war. I passed it on one drab occasion and recalled our bygone delight with a pang; for me it was a time of happiness at once placid and shot through with revelations. Despite her sophisticated background, Virginia seemed perfectly content with me, while every remark she let drop about the wider world she knew fascinated me.

  It could not last. Once I was back in school, old embargoes snapped back into force. They were too strong to overcome. Both sickroom and her room were now out of bounds to me. I had no pretexts for meeting her, or she me. We could occasionally look at each other, but that shy evasive smile held no special message for me. Ah, my lost Virginia!

  I cannot say love died. Indeed, it is not dead now. But I had to live as if it were dead. I had to work and play and laugh and swear. Brown jumped eagerly back into my bed again and we pulled each other off with almost the old abandon. Harper Junior, who had been growing obstreperous lately with the onset of puberty, was made to suck himself off by torchlight, in full disgraceful view of everyone. School life is school life. Reprieves are only reprieves.

  The ordeal of School Cert came and was survived. Even at the time it seemed a dim and academic exercise. As young men, we were fully aware of the torches burning in Europe, and the bayonets glinting and the crunch-crunch of marching feet. We envied and hated the Hitler Youth, with its general immorality (according to the propaganda) and the willingness of the German maidens to bring forth children. We were glad that – as yet – there was no war, but we hated the peace.

  Men aged twenty were already being conscripted into the forces; Britain was painfully waking. An old boy, a colonel, came down and talked to the school angrily about war. A recruiting poster appeared on the notice board. Hitler and Mussolini made their Pact of Steel. We swam in the green swimming-pool, and wanked and exercised and waited for the invisible flags that signal to young men.

  As Hitler’s Panzer divisions swept into Poland, my stern old grandfather was felled by a stroke. Nelson, my father, and I were sitting about uselessly in Grandfather’s silent house when Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was now at war with Germany. A few moments later our old family doctor pronounced Grandfather dead.

  ‘Just as well the old man never lived to hear the worst,’ Father said. He thought that war would ‘ruin everything’; and that was his dead father’s view also. Nelson and I looked speculatively at each other. I was two days past my seventeenth birthday. He, three years older, wore an incongruous army uniform. He had been called up two months before; this was his first forty-eight-hour leave. He and I had never seemed further apart; but he evidently understood what I was thinking, for he said, ‘You can’t join up yet!’

  ‘You’ll have to go back to school, Horatio,’ Father said. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe at Branwells. The Germans will not be able to bomb us here.’

  But I never went back to school again. Partly this was due to my parents; both were obsessed with how we could all be ‘safe’; Father began building an enormous air-raid shelter in the garden, conscripting me to help with the digging and concrete-mixing. It seemed to me an extremely futile operation.

  My chief reason for wishing never to see Branwells again, however, was entirely because of Virginia.

  We met a few days after war was declared, when the country was quivering with an indecisive excitement. That excitement also ran through Virginia’s slender frame. She had handed in her notice at Branwells and was going to join a nursing service! She hoped to go to France – she had old family friends
in Paris.

  This was – I must use the melodramatic old cliché which rang through my head at the time – the knell of doom. We were to be parted, perhaps for ever! I had hardly ever looked ahead. Inside our relationship I had been safe. The most I had imagined was that we should be together in the long summer holidays, that we might even swim in the river; or perhaps she and I might arrange to go down to the Hunstanton bungalow; or we would make love in one of the towers of Traven House. But now we were going to part for ever, and her darling tiny light would shine elsewhere! Paris! She might as well have said Mars!

  Faced with the prospect of parting, I realized bitterly I was just a kid. How could I keep her? Or find her again once she had gone?

  One thing at least was certain: those grey school buildings would be utterly intolerable without her dear transforming presence.

  I broke down and wept, but later and alone, when the shock really hit me. When Virginia was beside me I met her news with schoolboy flippancy.

  ‘Oh, you’ll look so ducky in nursing uniform, Virginia, and all the men will go mad about you! I must see you in it at least once.’

  ‘I don’t want to drive you mad!’

  ‘I am mad already. Before you go – Mother keeps asking me to ask you – come and have tea with us! Mother is anxious to see you again. And you’ll see Ann – she’s getting quite grown-up. She bought a lipstick in Woolworth’s the other day, and puts it on when Mother is out.’

  She sighed and looked down at her shoes.

  ‘Do you want me to come to tea?’