Any Human Heart (4 page)

‘I suppose I do, sir.’

‘I’ve never understood how a person of real intelligence can believe in a god. Or gods. It’s all balls, you know — complete balls. You must enlighten me one day. Ah, there’s your bus.’

Strange man, I thought on the way back. Not sexless, because he was leanly handsome enough, H-D, and sure of himself too. Very sure. Too uncompromising, really — perhaps that was it. Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise. And sometimes there appears something inhuman about Mr Holden-Dawes.

Good news on my return. A letter from Lucy, and Leeping told me he’d spoken to Beauchamp — who runs our house team — and I am to play in the scrum for our next match. As hooker. So it begins.

Scabius has finally met the elusive and ineffable Tess. They worked on some giant of a shire-horse preparing it for a show — grooming it, varnishing its hoofs, plaiting its mane and tail with ribbons and the rest, spending a whole afternoon together. So, what was she like, we asked? Really quite shy, Peter said. We reminded him we were indifferent to her personality; it was her physical charms that intrigued us. ‘Well, she’s quite small,’ he said, ‘I tower over her. And she has this terrible frizzy corkscrew hair she’s ashamed of, always hiding it under hats and scarves. Quite well endowed in the bosom department, as far as I can tell. And she bites her nails, down to the quick.’ They seem to have liked each other well enough, however, and she had invited him back to the farmhouse for tea.

Ben, in his turn, telephoned Father Doig and was told that, in the interests of absolute discretion, he should not come to the church at Glympton but rather meet in the house of one of his parishioners — a Mrs Catesby, who happened to live in Abbeyhurst itself — at times convenient to Ben. Thus Ben’s first encounter with Father Doig and the Roman Catholic Church is arranged for next Saturday afternoon in Mrs Catesby’s back parlour — a week from today.

In the meantime, I have played my first rugby match as hooker.

It was a wet, drizzly, cold afternoon as Soutar’s XV turned out on the south-east playing fields against Giffords’ XV. As both sides reluctantly stripped off and vaguely warmed up for the kick-off, it was apparent to me that we were the usual mix of lazy misfits, inept hearties and hopeless inadequates. Somewhere at the other end of the expanse of playing fields another match was going on and the routine shouts of encouragement and despair carried faintly to us over the sodden grass. We had one spectator, Mr Whitt, our assistant housemaster and theoretical coach of the house side, who, after we kicked off, bellowed and screamed on the touchline as if he were at a cup final. The teams were equally matched in terms of their deficiencies: balls were dropped, tackles fluffed, penalties missed. At half-time the score was 3-0 to Giffords’.

I was slowly accustomizing myself to life in the scrum, which seemed mainly to involve galloping about the field chasing the ball (which I didn’t touch once in the first half). This herd-like meandering was interrupted by whistle blasts, when we would line up for a throw-in or a scrum down. The two packs would face each other and then interlock. We then became a 32-legged, human beetle trying to evacuate an oval leather ball. I knew the two props on either side of me: improbably named Brown and Smith (Smith minor, in fact, Smith senior was head boy). Brown was a muddy enthusiast, tireless and full of get-up-and-go; Smith minor — who has truly distressing acne — is a miscreant poseur like me. It was strange to be in the curious dark cave of the scrum: so many heads and faces so close to each other, strange smells and exhalations, strange cheeks rubbing against yours, arms gripping your thighs, and the mixed shovings and heavings against your buttocks, aimless exhortations ringing in your ears, the scrumhalf with the ball screaming instructions (at, I suppose, me): ‘Ready, Soutar! Wheel right! Wheel right! Hold it! Coming, one, two, three!’ And there was the sodden dirty ball at my feet and I would hack away trying to heel it out and back, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, as everyone around me grunted and heaved and swore. This is not sport, I was thinking: give me my lonely, chilly isolation out on the left wing — at least there I could look at the landscape and the sky.

And then the ball would be out of the scrum. The shouts and instructions would become more distant and we would break out of our crab-like clinch, look around to see where the game was and lumber off in pursuit. I have to confess I was in a state of some despair as we neared the end of the match: I was filthy, covered in mud, exhausted and I had no real idea how the score had reached 9-all.

Then something happened in our half — a three-quarter kicked ahead and there was a fumble by the opposing full-back. Confusion, the ball over the line, fallen upon by one of the defending side. A tweet on the whistle and a drop-out on the twenty-five was ordered. Now I knew, from my perusal of the rule-book, that it was one of the hooker’s duties to confront the kicker of the 25-yard drop-out, to face him down and distract him as best he could. So I jogged up to the opponents’ 25-yard line, my boots as heavy as a deep-sea diver’s, my breath coming in great hoarse pants and with steam rising, it appeared, from every part of my body, from my shoulders and my bare knees. I still don’t know what made me do it, but, as I saw their fly-half stepping up to take the drop-kick, I simultaneously flung myself up and forward, arms raised in a vain attempt, at the very least, to put him off his stride. It worked: he kicked badly, low and hard, not high and hanging, and the ball blasted into the side of my face with such velocity that it rebounded a good twenty yards, close enough to the enemy line for one of our nippier three-quarters to dart in, snatch the ball up and score under the posts. Try converted — five points — victory to Soutar’s, 14-9.

The side of my face was on fire. I remember that once my mother slapped me on the cheek for some misdemeanour and the same pulsing, peppery, eye-watering heat was the result. The scarred wet leather of the ball left a smarting red weal across my left cheek and on my forehead above the left eye: my face felt molten, my flesh prickly and seared.

People — team-mates — were slapping me on the shoulders and on the back. Smith minor was shouting in my ear, ‘You mad bastard, you mad bastard!’ We had won and my inadvertent block had brought the win about: and somehow the pain I was in diminished, magically. Even Whitt, pipe jutting, thin hair strands blowing wildly, called out, ‘Damned good effort, Mountstuart!’

Later, after I had showered and changed and the redness had faded to a blushing, warm pink, I was heading for our set when I encountered little Montague. ‘Well done, Mountstuart,’ he said. ‘Well done for what, you filthy harlot,’ I replied (uncharitably, I confess). ‘Well,’ he said, ‘your charge-down. Everyone’s talking about it.’

My ‘charge-down’… So, this is how myths and legends are born. I realize now, with a small sense of absolute revelation, what the way ahead involves. The only possible route to the First XV and my colours is now revealed to me: I have to play with reckless, careless stupidity, the grossest foolhardiness. The more senseless I am, the more I risk life and limb, the more I will be recognized — and hailed. All I have to do is play rugby like a suicidal maniac.

Letter from Mother announcing that the Mountstuart family will be going to Austria for Easter, to Bad Riegerbach, to be precise, where Father is to take the waters. ‘He has a sort of anaemia,’ Mother writes, which is making him lose weight and become easily tired. So he is now officially ill, it is no longer just a confidential matter between him and me — but what, pray, is a ‘sort of anaemia’?

Ben had his first session with Fr Doig yesterday, which he described as ‘eerie’. Ben’s account sounded very Doig, to me, the man full of ill-concealed self-satisfaction at this potential scalp rather than displaying any concern to explore young Leeping’s religious doubts. They are to meet at least once a week at Mrs Catesby’s. Ben said that Doig could not conceal his huge disappointment that he was a lapsed Jew. An Anglican was small beer. At least, he’d said to Ben, you
look
Jewish. I think he was expecting some sort of bearded rabbinical figure with long curls dangling around his ears. Ben thinks his challenge will now be a walkover, Doig is so desperate. We both agree I have the most onerous task of the three of us.

Wrote a Spenserian ode on loss of faith. Not very good. I quite liked the line: ‘When faith has died
we
must paint the colours on the sky.’

Scabius, me, Lacey, Ridout, Sandal and Tothill all travelled to Oxford by train for our scholarship examinations. Eleven others went to Cambridge — Abbey boys have always been favoured by Cambridge colleges; but we are more of an unknown quantity in the City of Dreaming Spires. Peter and I deliberately lingered in the train until the last moment, so as to separate ourselves from the others, and then hired a pony and trap (more like a horse and cart) to take us and our luggage to our respective colleges. We were deposited on Broad Street — the Broad, as I must learn to call it — and Peter went to Balliol while I wandered up Turl Street with my suitcase looking for Jesus. As it happened I chose the wrong one (why do these colleges not post their names outside the main door?) and the porter at Lincoln, a surly brute, pointed me in the right direction.

Jesus was neither inspiring nor disappointing: two rather elegant small quadrangles and a perfectly acceptable chapel. But no college, however grand, could have looked its best on a damp and drizzly February afternoon — the sooty façades of the quads rendered almost black by the rain and the lawns tufty and unmown. I was shown to my rooms and I dined in hall. There seemed to be a lot of bearded, moustachioed, older undergraduates and I was told they were war veterans taking up their places at the university after their time in the army. I slipped out of college and went to Balliol to meet Peter but found the place firmly locked up. It’s a bad start for Oxford, in my opinion: it seems a gloomy, dirty, closed place. I feel I could find more kindred spirits at Abbey, it pains me to say. And Jesus, with all these mature men — like uncles, with their pipes and tweeds and facial hair — does not inspire. Perhaps Leeping is right: why do we want to waste three precious years of our life in these institutions?

A morning and afternoon spent taking the History papers, which seemed to pass off well enough. I answered questions on Palmerston’s second government, the French Revolution and Walpole’s financial reforms (dull stuff but full of arcane facts) and I think I gave a fair account of myself. After the afternoon paper I was summoned to meet the History fellow, Le Mayne — p.l. le mayne, it said on his door. This was the ‘friend’ H-D had talked about. He was a pugnacious, stocky, bearded man, and he looked me over with what can only be described as a mixture of distaste and mild curiosity.

‘Holden-Dawes says we should take you come what may,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why should we take you, Abbey boy?’

I muttered a few platitudes — Oxford, distinguished college, huge privilege, the honour — but he cut me short.

‘You’re losing it,’ he said.

‘Losing what?’

‘What vestiges of good opinion I had of you — stimulated by James. Why do you want to read History at Oxford? Convince me.’

I don’t know what came over me — perhaps it was the sense that all was lost already, perhaps it was Le Mayne’s abrasive indifference, not to say his overt dislike of me, so I said, regardless: ‘I don’t give two farthings for history. The only reason I want to come to this depressing place is that it will give me time — time to write.’

Le Mayne groaned, threw his head back and stroked his beard.

‘Heaven preserve me,’ he said, ‘another bloody writer.’

I thought about walking out but decided to play this one through.

‘I’m afraid so,’ I said suddenly, freshly audacious. ‘Please don’t expect an apology.’

He was unperturbed and said nothing, glancing tiredly at me, and then shuffled through my examination papers.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said wearily. ‘You can go.’

Later. Scabius told me that he had met three fellows and had even shaken the hand of the Dean of Balliol, Urquhart, himself. I had been in Le Mayne’s room about five minutes, if that. It seems to me that my Oxford career isn’t even going to get to the starting line. Before I came here Father wrote to say that there was always a job in junior management at Foley’s. I think I would rather slash my wrists.

Peter and I found a public house down by the canal where we drank beer and ate bread and cheese before catching our train back to Norwich. Peter’s tutor had shaken his hand at the end of the interview and said he looked forward to seeing him in September. I saw Le Mayne cross the quad in the morning and he had looked right through me with no sign of recognition at all.

Writing this on the train back, fighting against a mounting sense of depression. Ridout and Tothill are playing gin rummy. Peter is asleep, confidently asleep. If I don’t get in to Oxford, what will I do? Go to Paris with Ben? Join Father’s firm? It’s all too damnably frustrating. Thank God we had the foresight to set ourselves these challenges this term: it is almost shaming to say this, but, currently, the one thing in my life that I anticipate with some excitement is the prospect of the match tomorrow against O’Connor’s. Younger said he might come and watch. Could this be the first step?

Scabius and the lubricious Tess held hands for a few minutes as they walked along some path somewhere after lunch. Peter says she took his hand but he didn’t dare do anything else, then she had to release it when they reached a stile and that was that. I said it was an excellent sign and in future he should take more advantage of such opportunities.