My Name is Michael Sibley (4 page)

“So you were wrong, weren’t you?” he would say.

“Oh, all right, all right, I was wrong, then, if you like.”

“Well, apologize, then.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you were wrong. Go on, apologize.”

“I don’t see why I should.”

“You made a wrong statement. I have proved it wrong. Well, apologize for making it, go on.”

“I’m damned if I will. Bread, please.”

“Why should I pass the bread?”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t you apologize and admit you were wrong?”

“I’ve admitted I was wrong.”

“Well, go on—apologize.”

“Oh, all right, all right, I apologize. Bread, please.”

He was gay and had humour of a sort, and I think he often domineered, not out of malice, but for the fun of the game. But it made it no easier to bear. He seemed so heartless.

On one occasion only, Prosset and I were united on an emotional issue. It was before we got our studies. Ackersley, the assistant housemaster, was the cause of it, a man clearly destined to be one of the world’s failures; he was a gentle, middle-aged man with a passion for fly-fishing which he could not afford to indulge, and he would listen avidly to the accounts boys told of the fine fishing they had had, and sigh, and say such fishing was not meant for poor schoolmasters.

In appearance, he was of medium height and slim. He had a lean face and a long nose, and was afflicted with one of those blue-black jowls and the very red lips which sometimes go with them. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles, and his voice had that soft, bottled-up quality which you sometimes come across. He had neither a voice nor an appearance to inspire respect in boys, and he got none. It was all rather painful, really, and some of us even pitied him, but not many.

When he took “prep” in the evenings, instead of the deep hush normally required on such occasions, the Common Room buzzed and hummed like the stalls on the first night of a new play; until at least even Ackersley felt he had to do something. He would try to raise his voice above the din to still it, and all would be quiet for about five minutes. Then the murmuring, gradually increasing in volume, would begin all over again. It was hopeless.

When he supervised supper last thing at night the air would be filled with pellets of bread as the boys at the three long tables happily pelted each other. Now and again, for a lark, a group of boys by a combined effort would raise their long table almost above their heads. Ackersley would usually pretend not to see. He would keep his eyes glued to the Bible, as though he were reading the text which preceded the evening prayers. It seemed to me that the House mocked and oppressed him in some such way as Prosset did me; I felt that in a measure we were fellow sufferers; I understood how he felt in the face of such mockery: ineffectual, almost tearfully ineffectual. I guessed from the way he occasionally mentioned Mrs. Ackersley, that when he returned home to his lodgings and his wife he found in her a refuge and a balm which he could find nowhere else.

One evening the Head House Prefect was taking “prep,” which meant that there was a very deep hush indeed, and no nonsense at all. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, very light and still, so that you could hear the birds twittering outside. I was in one of the back rows of desks, drowsing over a geometry problem, and apart from the birds there was no sound except the occasional noise of a desk being quietly opened and shut, or of the leaves of a book being turned, or of a hand brushing paper clean after rubbing something out.

Suddenly one of the other prefects came into the room and whispered something to the Head Prefect. He got up quickly and left the dais and went out of the room for a minute or two. Whereupon, starting at the front row of desks and working back to me, increasing in volume as it approached, came a swift sound like the hiss of the sea on shingle. Each boy as he received the news turned round and passed it eagerly to the row behind; sometimes their eyes were shining with delight which boys have when they can impart staggering news; sometimes their faces were flushed and startled: “Ackers is dead! Ackers has shot himself! Ackers’s wife died! Ackers has committed suicide!”

Then the Head Prefect came back and called for silence. He said nothing. Possibly some of us remembered how Ackersley’s life had been made a misery. I can’t help thinking now that if we had not tortured him so much, if his school hours had not been such a misery, he might have found strength to carry on. As it was, he had not the strength. He did not know where he could find safety from his thoughts at night. His refuge was gone. Only the cruelties, the frustration, the desperate feeling of being ineffectual, unwanted, a comic-looking failure, remained. There was nothing else, I suppose. I think we killed Ackers, taking a broad view of it all, as surely as if we had ourselves pressed the trigger of the revolver he used, only we were not so humane.

When “prep” was over, the House at once broke up into small groups of wildly chattering boys. The noise, the speculations, the rumours drove me from the Common Room. I walked down the long stone corridor, now growing dark, into the spacious quiet of the gymnasium. I thought I was alone until, in the half-light, I saw Prosset, hands in trouser pockets, looking silently out of one of the long windows. He turned round and looked at me as I crossed the floor, and then went on staring out into the twilight.

I said, “I got fed up with all the excitement.”

He nodded. “Morbid lot of swine. They make me sick.”

We exchanged one or two further comments in low tones; then the supper bell rang. Years later, when the climax came between Prosset and myself, I remembered this incident, but by then it was too late; there were too many other complications.

Thinking back along the trail of the years, I do not think he actively liked me at school, but rather that he liked having me around. I was a good butt for his boisterous humour, in addition to providing an outlet for his mental vigour. He would come tiptoeing into my study, where I sat with my back to the door, and suddenly sweep three or four books off my desk on to the floor, and laugh, and when I bent down to pick them up he would jerk the chair away from under me; or if I was gazing out of the window, dreaming, chin in hand, he would suddenly knock my elbow away; or creep up behind and aim a blow with his hand, directed so that it just skimmed the top of my head. Sometimes he would start a friendly tussle with me, and when I took my spectacles off as I had to, he would grab them and dash off and hide them. And, of course, he criticized me unmercifully whenever the chance occurred.

His relationship with David Trevelyan was different. The Cornishman had an agile brain and quick tongue. Prosset never clashed with David and David never provoked him. There was a tacit understanding that they should respect each other, and sharpen their wits when necessary on me. As a result, David rarely sided with me; he was on the side of the big battalions.

I was the mascot of the team; not even that: I was the tame buffoon; and like the court fool I was well fed, had my just share of everything, and was duly protected against unfair aggression. Like the king’s jester, too, unsuspected by everybody I was often extremely unhappy.

It got to the stage where I used to look forward to the occasional days when Prosset might be away from the dining-room table playing an away match for the Second Fifteen, and later, for the First Fifteen. Once, when he was in bed for a week with a touch of influenza, the lightening of the oppressive atmosphere which pressed down so heavily upon me was like a glimpse of sunshine on a heavy day. Although I did not wish him to die, at that stage in our relationship, I was certainly sorry that he recovered so quickly.

But nobody knew of all this. Everybody thought I was very lucky to be able to go about with Prosset and Trevelyan.

Perhaps I should have broken away from them at this point; I say them, because David would certainly have stayed with Prosset. I suppose I could have found some other chap to go around with. There was the studious Willet, a little thing who looked like a white slug; and Banks, red-headed and so temperamental that he rarely kept friends for long; or Wilson, known as “Oiler” Wilson, because he had a greasy, fawning smile; and several others of the rag, tag and bobtail, the residue, the boys who were not popular, the floating population, the friendless and the outcasts.

But on what grounds?

Having gone through three-quarters of our school career together, what reason could I give for suddenly wishing to split the partnership? I couldn’t just say: “Because I want to.” Prosset would not take that for an answer. I imagined the way the conversation would go:

“Next term I think I’ll walk with Wilson or somebody, Prosset. No offence or anything.”

A blank silence while he gazed at me amazed.

“But why, old man? What’s up with you?”

“Nothing’s up with me. I just want to, that’s all.”

“But why? There must be some reason.”

“No; there isn’t.”

“You can’t break up the gang in our last year without some reason, man. Go on, tell me, old man.”

“Well, you two rag me such a lot.”

“Rag you?”

“Yes. You know, arguing and making jokes about me, and hiding my glasses and all the rest of it. I get fed up with it.”

He would give me one of his rather contemptuous looks. Probably he would go and fetch David Trevelyan. They would roar with laughter.

“If you don’t want us to take any notice of you, we won’t,” David would say.

“Oh, let him go and walk with Oiler Wilson if he wants to, David. If he prefers Oiler to us.”

“It’s not that at all. I can’t really explain it.” Nor could I have done. I never could talk clearly and with conviction.

David Trevelyan and John Prosset would look at each other in exaggerated mystification. Later, Prosset would record it all in his red diary in his study: Old Sibley had gone all queer! What a funny fellow old Sibley was! But old Sibley had come round in the end. Queer fellow, Sibley.

They would make me feel that here was something so inexplicable that only an oddity like myself could act in such a manner; and if there is one thing a boy cannot stand, it is the thought that he is an oddity, something different from others.

I was an ordinary boy with an ordinary boy’s reactions. I felt I could never do it. I never tried.

Should I have tried? Looking back now, the answer must be yes; whatever the price in ostracism, in queer looks from others in the House, in humiliation, it would have been worth it. Anything, I see now, would have been worth it.

Then David Trevelyan left to start work on his father’s farm. Thus the trio was broken up; and I was alone with Prosset. Strangely enough, that was slightly better. It put me more on a level with him. Instead of being the third in the trio, the one whom the other two so often united to laugh at, and at other times ignored altogether, I now shared all his conversation.

He was destined to go into the United Imperial Bank, largely because his uncle was manager at one of the more important branches. The idea of it filled him with dismay. The role of a humble and humdrum bank clerk with regular hours had no appeal for that adventurous and aggressive nature. However, he was planning that after a year or two he would apply to be transferred to one of their branches in the Far East. His father had been manager of a branch in Shanghai, but was now retired and lived with his mother in Galway. Here the old man could indulge his liking for shooting and fishing, not to mention an occasional day out with the Galway Blazers, at reasonable cost.

The problem of where he should live in London had always been clear in Prosset’s mind. He would have what he called, in the language of Victorian novels, “bachelor lodgings.” There he would entertain his friends, and generally live the life of a gentleman about town.

“I expect my pater will help me out with an allowance,” he told me. He was always an optimist.

My Aunt Edith, with whom I lived after the death of my mother, my father being in India, once suggested that Prosset should be a paying guest in her house in Earl’s Court, but I told her he had already got his eye on a place. Quite apart from my own feelings, Prosset’s flamboyant character hardly fitted into that dingy house of fringed tablecloths, small potted palms, and stained-glass windows on the landings. As a matter of fact, I never had the courage to introduce him to Aunt Edith. With her widow’s weeds, pale, pear-shaped face and jet earrings, she was hardly his type.

Although things were slightly better during Prosset’s last term, I looked forward with longing to the end of it. I was to stay on another term, and during that term I would be free, an untrammelled personality of my own; free to engage on equal terms in the dinner-table conversation, without the fear of being set upon by Prosset with one of his tenacious onslaughts; free to suggest some plan without it being greeted with scorn; to laze in my study on a Sunday afternoon if I wished, instead of being forced to play cricket in the yard, or go swimming; I always regarded cold water with some dislike.

I already had my eye on another boy with whom I would go about. He was called Crane, a worthy, dull individual in the Sixth Form; an eminently likeable chap who would always be prepared to adjust his plans to your own; who would meet you halfway in an argument, and even admit defeat if he thought your reasoning sounder than his. A very different proposition from Prosset. Above all, I would not have to smile feebly when all the time I was smarting under some derisive remark from Prosset, pretending that I enjoyed the joke, that I thought him vastly funny and clever and witty, and what have you, when all the time I was hating him.