A Question of Upbringing (9 page)

‘My elder sister had a beau who lived in the Happy Valley. He shot himself after having a lot of drinks at the club.’

‘Perhaps it won’t be so bad then.’

‘Did you lunch with them in London or the country?’

‘London.’

‘Stringham says Glimber is pretty, but too big.’

‘Will he come into it?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ said Templer. ‘It is only his mother’s
for life. He will come into precious little if she goes on spending money at her present rate.’

I was not sure how much of this was to be believed; but, thinking the subject of interest, enquired further. Templer sketched in a somewhat lurid picture of Mrs. Foxe and her set. I was rather surprised to find that he himself had no ambition to become a member of that world, the pleasures of which sounded of a kind particularly to appeal to him.

‘Too much of a good thing,’ he said. ‘I have simpler tastes.’

I was reminded of Stringham’s disparagement of Buster on the ground that he was ‘too grand’; and also of the reservations he had expressed regarding Templer himself. Clearly some complicated process of sorting-out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life. I asked more questions about Templer’s objection to house-parties at Glimber. He said: ‘Well, I imagine it was all rather pompous even at lunch, wasn’t it?’

‘Buster seemed rather an ass. His mother was awfully nice.’

Even at the time I felt that the phrase was not a very adequate way of describing Mrs. Foxe’s forceful, even dazzling, characteristics.

‘Oh, she is all right, I have no doubt,’ said Templer. ‘And damned good-looking still. She gave Stringham’s sister absolute hell, though, until she married the first chap that came along.’

‘Who was he?’

‘I can’t remember his name. A well-known criminal with one arm.’

‘Stringham certainly seemed in bad form when she was there.’

‘She led his father a dance, too.’

‘Still, he need not join in all that if he doesn’t want to.’

‘He will want to,’ said Templer. ‘Take my word for it, he will soon disappear from sight so far as we are concerned.’

Armed, as I have said, with the knowledge of Stringham’s admission regarding his own views on Templer, I recognised that there must be some truth in this judgment of Stringham’s character; though some of its implications—notably with regard to myself—I failed, rather naturally, to grasp at that period. That was the only occasion when I ever heard Templer speak seriously about Stringham, though he often used to refer to escapades in which they had shared, especially the incident of Le Bas’s arrest.

So far as Templer and I were concerned, nothing further had taken place regarding this affair; though Templer’s relations with Le Bas continued to be strained. Although so little involved personally in the episode, I found myself often thinking of it. Why, for example, should Stringham, singularly good-natured, have chosen to persecute Le Bas in this manner? Was it a matter for regret or congratulation: had it, indeed, any meaning at all? The circumstances revealed at once Stringham’s potential assurance, and the inadequacy of Le Bas’s defences. If Stringham had been brutal, Le Bas had been futile. In spite of his advocacy of the poem, Le Bas had not learnt its lesson:

‘And then we turn unwilling feet
And seek the world—so must it be—
We
may not linger in the heat
Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!’

He was known for a long time after as ‘Braddock alias Thorne’, especially among his colleagues, whose theory was
that the hoaxer had recently left the school, and, while passing through the town, probably in a car, had decided to tease Le Bas. Certainly Stringham would never have been thought capable of such an enormity by any master who had ever come in contact with him. Not unnaturally, however, Le Bas’s tendency to feel that the world was against him was accentuated by an experience in many ways humiliating enough; and he persecuted Templer—or, at least, his activities in this direction were represented by Templer as persecution—more energetically than ever.

Finally Templer’s habitual carelessness gave Le Bas an opportunity to close the account. This conclusion was the result of Templer leaving his tobacco pouch—on which, characteristically, he had inscribed his initials—lying on the trunk of a tree somewhere among the fields where we had happened on Le Bas. Cobberton, scouting round that neighbourhood, had found the pouch, and passed it on to Le Bas. Nothing definite could be proved against Templer: not even the ownership of a half-filled tobacco pouch, though no one doubted it was his. However, Le Bas moved heaven and earth to be rid of Templer, eventually persuading the headmaster to the view that life would be easier for both of them if Templer left the school. In consequence, Peter’s father was persuaded to remove him a term earlier than previously intended. This pleased Templer himself, and did not unduly ruffle his father; who was reported to take the view that schools and universities were, in any case, waste of time and money: on the principle that an office was the place in which to learn the realities of life. And so I was left, as it seemed to me, alone.

Templer was not a great hand at letter-writing after his departure; though an occasional picture post-card used to arrive, stating his score at the local golf tournament, or saying that he was going to Holland to learn business methods.
Before he left school, he had suggested several times that I should visit his home, always qualifying his account of the amusements there offered by a somewhat menacing picture of his father’s habitually cantankerous behaviour. I did not take these warnings about his father too seriously because of Templer’s tendency to impute bad temper to anyone placed in a position of authority in relation to himself. At the same time, I had the impression that Mr. Templer might be a difficult man to live with; I even thought it possible that Peter’s dealings with Le Bas might derive from experience of similar skirmishes with his father. Peter’s chief complaint, so far as his father was concerned, seemed directed not towards any violent disagreement between them in tastes, or way of life, so much as to the fact that his father, in control of so much more money than himself, showed in his son’s eyes on the whole so little capacity for putting this favourable situation to a suitable advantage. ‘Wait till you see the car we have to use for station work,’ Peter used to say. Then you will understand what sort of a man my father is.’

The invitation arrived just when the mechanical accessories of leaving school were in full swing. Later in the summer it had been arranged that, before going up to the university, I should spend a period in France; partly with a view to learning the language: partly as a solution to that urgent problem—inviting one’s own as much as other people’s attention—of the disposal of the body of one of those uneasy, stranded beings, no longer a boy and hardly yet a man. The Templer visit could be fitted in before the French trip took place.

Stringham’s letters from Kenya reported that he liked the place better than he had expected. They contained drawings of people met there, and of a horse he sometimes rode. He could not really draw at all, but used a convention of blobs
and spidery lines, effective in expressing the appearance of persons and things. One of these was of Buster selling a car; another of Buster playing polo. I used to think sometimes of the glimpse I had seen of Stringham’s life at home; and—although this did not occur to me at once—I came in time to regard his circumstances as having something in common with those of Hamlet. His father had, of course, been shipped off to Kenya rather than murdered; but Buster and his mother were well adapted to play the parts of Claudius and Gertrude. I did not manage to get far beyond this, except to wonder if Miss Weedon was a kind of female Polonius, working on Hamlet’s side. I could well imagine Stringham stabbing her through the arras. At present there was no Ophelia. Stringham himself had a decided resemblance to the Prince of Denmark; or, as Templer would have said: ‘It was the kind of part the old boy would fancy himself in.’

At first sight the Templers’ house seemed to be an enormously swollen villa, red and gabled, facing the sea from a small park of Scotch firs: a residence torn by some occult power from more appropriate suburban setting, and, at the same time, much magnified. It must have been built about twenty or thirty years before, and, as we came along the road, I saw that it stood on a piece of sloping ground set about a quarter of a mile from the cliff’s edge. The clouded horizon and olive-green waves lapping against the stones made it a place of mystery in spite of this outwardly banal appearance: a sea-palace for a version of one of those embarkation scenes of Claude Lorraine—the Queen of Sheba, St. Ursula, or perhaps The Enchanted Castle—where any adventure might be expected.

There were a pair of white gates at the entrance to the drive, and a steep, sandy ascent between laurels. At the
summit, the green doors of a row of garages faced a cement platform. As we drove across this open space a girl of about sixteen or seventeen, evidently Peter’s unmarried sister, Jean, was closing one of the sliding doors. Fair, not strikingly pretty, with long legs and short, untidy hair, she remained without moving, intently watching us, as Peter shut off the engine, and we got out of the car. Like her legs, her face was thin and attenuated, the whole appearance given the effect of a much simplified—and somewhat self-conscious—arrangement of lines and planes, such as might be found in an Old Master drawing, Flemish or German perhaps, depicting some young and virginal saint; the racquet, held awkwardly at an angle to her body, suggesting at the same time an obscure implement associated with martyrdom. The expression of her face, although sad and a trifle ironical, was not altogether in keeping with this air of belonging to another and better world. I felt suddenly uneasy, and also interested: a desire to be with her, and at the same time, an almost paralysing disquiet at her presence. However, any hopes or fears orientated in her direction were quickly dissolved, because she hardly spoke when Peter introduced us, except to say in a voice unexpectedly deep, and almost as harsh as her brother’s: ‘The hard court needs re-surfacing.’

Then she walked slowly towards the house, humming to herself, and swinging her racquet at the grass borders. Peter shouted after her: ‘Has Sunny arrived yet?’

‘He turned up just after you left.’

She made this answer without turning her head. It conveyed no implication of disapproval; no enthusiasm either. I watched her disappear from sight.

‘Leave your stuff here,’ said Peter. ‘Someone is bound to collect it. Let’s have some tea. What bloody bad manners my sisters have.’

Wearing a soft felt hat squashed down in the shape of a pork-pie, he already showed signs of having freed himself from whatever remaining restraints school had imposed. He had spent a month or two in Amsterdam, where his father had business interests. Mr. Templer’s notion was that Peter should gain in this way some smattering of commercial life before going into the City; as all further idea of educating or improving his son had now been abandoned by him. Peter could give no very coherent account of Dutch life, except to say that the canals smelt bad, and that there were two night-clubs which were much better than the others in that city. Apart from such slightly increased emphasis on characteristics already in evidence, he was quite unchanged.

‘Who is Sunny?’

‘He is called Sunny Farebrother, a friend of my father’s. He was staying in the neighbourhood for a funeral and has come over to talk business.’

‘Your father’s contemporary?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Peter. ‘Much younger. Thirty or thirty-five. He is supposed to have done well in the war. At least I believe he got rather a good D.S.O.’

The name ‘Sunny Farebrother’ struck me as almost redundant in its suggestion of clear-cut, straightforward masculinity. It seemed hardly necessary for Peter to add that someone with a name like that had ‘done well’ in the war, so unambiguous was the portrait conjured up by the syllables. I imagined a kind of super-Buster, in whom qualities of intrepidity and simplicity of heart had been added to those of dash and glitter.

‘Why is he called Sunny?’ I asked, expecting some con-firmation of this imaginary personality with which I had invested Mr. Farebrother.

‘Because his Christian name is Sunderland,’ said Peter. ‘I
expect we shall have to listen to a lot of pretty boring conversation between the two of them.’

We entered the house at a side door. The walls of the greater part of the ground floor were faced with panelling, coloured and grained like a cigar-box. At the end of a large hall two men were sitting on a sofa by a tea-table at which Jean was pouring out cups of tea. The elder of this couple, a wiry, grim little fellow, almost entirely bald, and smoking a pipe, was obviously Peter’s father. His identity was emphasised by the existence of a portrait of himself hanging on the wall above him—the only picture in the room—representing its subject in a blue suit and hard white collar. The canvas, from the hand of Isbister, the R.A., had been tackled in a style of decidedly painful realism, the aggressive nature of the pigment intensified by the fact that each feature had been made to appear a little larger than life.

‘Hullo, Jenkins,’ said Mr. Templer, raising his hand. ‘Have some tea. Pour him out some tea, Jean. Well, go on, Farebrother—but try and stick to the point this time.’

He turned again to the tall, dark man sitting beside him. This person, Sunny Farebrother presumably, had shaken hands warmly, and given a genial smile when I approached the table. At Mr. Templer’s interpellation, this smile faded from his face in a flash, being replaced by a look of almost devotional intensity; and, letting drop my hand with startling suddenness, he returned to what seemed to be a specification of the terms and bearings of a foreign loan—apparently Hungarian—which he and Mr. Templer had evidently been discussing before our arrival. Jean handed me the plate of buttered toast, and, addressing herself to Peter, spoke once more of the hard tennis court.