Song at Twilight (3 page)

And, of course the man to whom I opened the door had a name beginning with 'E'. He always did these days.

I was rather annoyed. I had spent the morning with Timothy Hooper almost as if he had been really there and I was quite happy eating my lunch alone and playing childish games with my apple peel. I had no need of Eric just now.

Eric had a bunch of snowdrops in his hand, and a little sprig of catkins.

'The first sign of Spring,' he said, stepping uninvited over the threshold. Pansy followed him, jumping excitedly at his calves. Pansy has grown very fond of Eric over the past few months.

"Do come in," I said. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

Eric had come to call because he was worried about me. He hadn't seen me for a day or two and what with the cold weather, he wondered if I was all right.

I supposed I should be grateful for such concern. But I remained irritated.

"Shall I put these in water?" he asked indicating the snowdrops and busily opening the cupboard doors in search of a vase.

I felt a wave of such irritation that I wondered for a moment if I could refrain from being rude.

When Eric had put the snowdrops in water, he noticed that my coal bucket was empty and, without a word, he shuffled off through the back-door to the coal shed and came back a few moments later with it filled to the brim.

At that point I did feel grateful and somewhat ashamed of my initial feelings of unfriendliness.

"It's all in the day's work," he said.

As he sat drinking his coffee, Eric began to talk about his wife. He often talked about his wife. Sometimes he mentioned his only son who lived in Australia, but mostly he talked about his wife. In fact, I should say that she was his favourite topic of conversation. He didn't speak about her in a particularly personal fashion but commented more on her tastes, or remarked that she was brought up in Norfolk. On this occasion he told me that she was very good at arranging flowers. She always had flowers in the house. She believed that flowers in a house made for a calm atmosphere. My sense of shame deepened as he spoke and as I considered my own selfishness. Eric was, no doubt, a very lonely man and I should be glad to befriend him. Who, after all, am I to sit in my ivory tower making judgments on the world and contributing nothing?

Eric is kind to me, perhaps with an ulterior motive; but he is kind and he deserves my gratitude.

I began suddenly to take an interest in what he was saying about his wife. Perhaps, I thought, when I have finished writing about Timothy, I shall write a novel after all. And as he spoke I studied his face more carefully than I had ever done before.
Je
l'ai
dévisagé
, as they say in French. I took his face to pieces.

The funny thing is that up to that moment I had only really seen Eric as a sort of messy shape, recognising him by his gait and his untidy tweed jacket rather than by his features on which I had never before focused.

He might have been quite good-looking as a young man, I thought for the first time. He had a straight nose and good eyes, an altogether agreeable cast of feature. I wondered what his wife had been like.

"…she was a very good-natured person," he was saying, "never allowed herself to get flustered." He sighed deeply. "I never thought she'd be the first to go."

Eric sat there for some time, long into the afternoon. When he left I felt a sense of relief at having my house to myself again, but I supposed that I had alleviated his loneliness. I glanced at the snowdrops he had brought. They were delicate single ones. I fussed around the kitchen for a while, tidying up my lunch and the coffee cups, and wondered what to do next. I didn't feel like going back to my writing and neither did I really want to go for a walk. So I told Pansy that she would have to forgo her walk. Dear Pansy is so philosophical – she accepted her fate like an angel. Perhaps I would lie down, but for some reason I felt restless and uneasy. Eric had interrupted the tenor of my day. He really was quite an intrusive person.

*

I did not teach Timothy Hooper until he was in his second year at Blenkinsop's. 

When he returned to school after those first summer holidays I was quite surprised by the change that had come over the boy. In only two months he had grown considerably taller, his voice had just begun to break and his pristine complexion was marred by acne, and yet he seemed rather better looking than before, or would have been had he managed to walk with a more self-confident air, with his shoulders back as they were when he sang in the choir. I wondered how he had spent the holidays and how his pretty little mother had entertained him.

For my own part I was glad to be back at school after the long holiday which I had mostly spent redecorating my kitchen, although I did stay for a week with Victor and Patricia and went for another week to Normandy with a woman friend of mine, a former maths teacher at Blenkinsop's.

I have to admit that I had a most peculiar feeling of expectation and mild excitement at the prospect of teaching Timothy's class. I felt, in some sort of way, as though I already had an understanding and a certain intimacy with the boy, although I wonder if at that stage he had any awareness at all of my own identity.

So it was with a certain feeling of trepidation that I entered that classroom for the first time that Autumn Term. There were nineteen children in the class and they were divided almost evenly into girls and boys. Some of the girls I had already taught at Doble's, but they had changed a great deal since then.

This was a class of fourteen-year-olds, and in it most of the girls were made up in a way that jarred extraordinarily with their school uniform, although I have observed that only very young schoolgirls make themselves up in that particularly ridiculous fashion. I wondered then at the adolescent male libido which was supposed to be provoked by so brash and yet so false a display of female charms.

Not that the young males were any more appealing. Except for Timothy. It seemed to me that although most of them were not exactly large, their bodies took up too much room. They spread their thighs in an aggressive, arrogant manner, pushed and pulled at each other like young puppies, and often smelt. They showed off to the girls who, in their turn, showed off to the boys and I wondered, as I often did in those days, how I was ever going to capture the attention of any one of them in order to instil in them the least understanding of the refinements of French grammar.

Timothy sat at the back of the class. He was quite quiet. The boy with whom I had seen him so often the year before was not there. He must have been in a different set. I wondered if they were still friends.

As the term progressed I found that Timothy, as other teachers had already told me, was attentive and reliable, but by no means brilliant. Although he was quiet, he was not unapproachably introverted so I do not know what it was about him that gave me a very strong impression of loneliness. Perhaps I even imagined it at that stage. I had, after all, developed a mild fascination for this boy and perhaps I invested him with feelings and thoughts which he did not have. In any case I felt a warm sympathy for him. So much so, that I found myself minding what he thought about me and hoping that he liked me.

We all want to be liked, but I have always attempted, in my professional capacity at least, to pay no attention to such matters. If a teacher is good at his or her job, and if he is fair, the chances are that his pupils will like him, but this liking should not be what he primarily seeks. I think that I can honestly say that although I have always been gratified as anyone would be by the slightest sign of being liked by my pupils, I have never, in all my years of teaching, gone out of my way to court popularity, except perhaps, very slightly, in the case of Timothy. I cannot say what precisely it was about him which provoked this interest unless it really was, as I have indicated, quite simply his forlorn little face on that first day when he arrived at Blenkinsop's.

I wanted him to know that I liked him and I wanted his respect and trust. I even think that I may have wanted a certain indefinable, but real understanding to develop between us; such an understanding as I fondly imagined a mother might have with her child. But by mid-December when school broke up, I had the feeling that, despite all this, I did not know Timothy any better than I had done at the beginning of September. 

When school reassembled after Christmas for the Spring Term, I sensed even more acutely than before an aura of loneliness around the boy. Since his voice had broken he had left the choir and I wondered if he participated in any other school activities. I rather gathered that he did not and decided that if I could find an opportunity to speak to him alone, I might bring the subject up.

I noticed almost immediately that Timothy's work was not up to standard that term. He started to be late for lessons and no longer appeared to be paying very much attention in class. I wondered what trauma had come to disturb him over Christmas, or was his behaviour merely coming into line with that of most of his contemporaries – at least his male contemporaries. On the whole the laziest of my pupils were all boys. Perhaps Timothy thought at that stage that the role of the male teenager was one to adopt and that it would help him to fit in more easily with his peers.

I looked at Timothy sitting as usual at the back of the classroom. He was better looking than I had at first thought and he had an endearing quality of thoughtfulness about him. I imagined him to be a gentle, sensitive person. I wished I could help him.

About half way through that term, which was already going badly for Timothy, there occurred a very unpleasant incident. A poem with homosexual overtones, written on school paper in what was probably Timothy Hooper's handwriting, was found on the floor in his houseroom and pinned to the noticeboard by some well-wisher with, written underneath it in large, red, block capitals, the words ‘Timothy Hooper is a poof’.

This disagreeable piece of information came to my ears from Timothy's housemaster.

So I took the opportunity to expound on my worries about the boy.

"The trouble with young Hooper," said his housemaster, "is that he hasn't understood the simple fact that school rules apply to him too."

I was rather surprised to hear this, as Timothy gave me the impression of being the kind of boy who, generally speaking, tries not to be conspicuous. And if you don't want to be conspicuous in an institution, you usually obey the rules.

"And the trouble with all you women," said the housemaster, "is that you're too soft-hearted. Let the little so-and-sos get away with murder."

Then he added something very peculiar. It was in fact so peculiar that I at first supposed that I had misheard him, but I thought about it afterwards long and hard, and I am quite certain that what he said was:

"You're all really just longing to be raped."

Even if I were longing to be raped, which I am not, I can hardly see what such a statement had to do with poor Timothy. If his housemaster was not prepared to take him seriously, someone else would have to. That someone else, I supposed, might just as well be me. I did, after all, have the boy's welfare at heart.

I decided that, at all costs, I must engineer a tête-à-tête with Timothy. In the event this was easy to do as when he failed to turn in his next two pieces of work, I had an excuse to ask him to come and see me.

It had been my practice over the years to invite various pupils for various reasons to tea in my house which was only some ten or twelve minutes' walk from the school and it was evident to me that my little kitchen often provided a welcome refuge for the chosen few from the hurly-burly of school.

So it was that I came to invite Timothy to tea for the first time.

Chapter 3

February 26th

I wonder what has happened to Eric. I don't seem to have seen him for several days now. On Saturday morning I heard the latch click on the garden gate and I was sure that it must be he, but when I looked out of the window I saw the Colonel's wife from the other end of the village walking up my path. It turned out that she was collecting money for the village hall. I am permanently surprised by the amount of money which needs to be collected for various causes in this village. Since I have lived here, which is only for about five months, hardly a week has gone by without someone wanting money for something.

Anyway, Eric didn't put in an appearance all Saturday and I didn't see him yesterday either, although he may well have called while I was out at lunch. I went to lunch with Victor and Patricia, yesterday being Sunday.

Victor and Patricia live in a fairly substantial, very pleasant village house with a large garden and a paddock. They have lived there since their children were small and since Victor became a partner in the firm of travel agents in which he has worked since leaving school.

The house is sunny and, despite the gloomy nature of its owners, it is surprisingly welcoming with its wide sash windows and pleasant views down the hill and across the churchyard to the rolling countryside beyond the thirteenth-century tower.

I found Victor yesterday looking particularly pale and tense. He even looked a little mad, I thought, with his wispy remains of hair sticking out untidily behind his ears, his thin, drawn features and an almost haunted look behind his hooded eyes. But he welcomed me kindly as usual and handed me a generous glass of dry sherry.

"Leo," he said, hunching up his shoulders uncomfortably as an almost imperceptible shudder passed through his lank body, "worries me. He should have a proper job. His mother thinks he needs a girlfriend, but, as far as I can see, a proper job is much more important. He'll never get anywhere in life if he doesn't drop this acting lark. I have told him time and again that he'd do much better to give the whole thing up, come down here and try to get a job with one of the estate agents. Property's booming. It would make much more sense altogether."

I didn't think that Victor was really making very much sense himself and tried to put in an understanding word for Leo. But Victor is always very firmly set in his opinions and I doubt that he was even listening to me.

Leo, who was out of the room at the time of this conversation, and Laurel were both present for lunch. Leo was at his best, playing the part of a casual young man to perfection. Leo is clever and full of energy so that he throws himself into whatever he is doing with tremendous verve, and usually does it well.

Leo would not make a good estate agent but the role of an out-of-work actor suits him to a T. He has certainly managed at quite a young age to find what I feel sure will be his part for life. Perhaps it is made easier for him by the fact that he is not only clever, but handsome and funny as well. I may say that I find it quite impossible to imagine how he came by such qualities. His parents both appear to be completely nonplussed by him.

At lunch Victor and Patricia discussed their summer holiday.

Victor was in favour of the Lake District which might seem rather unadventurous for a travel agent, but Victor has lost his enthusiasm for leaving these shores since the Zeebrugge ferry disaster.

"You weren't exactly Marco Polo before," Leo remarked casually.

Leo was quite right. 

Victor was just too young for the Second World War and later failed his army medical and so was exempted from National Service. The reasons for this failure were never really explained – to me at any rate – although I have the rather mean suspicion that enuresis may have been a factor. But then that is something about which I would never have dreamed of questioning my brother.

As a result Victor, unlike most of his contemporaries, never had an enforced spell abroad and I should imagine that he has only been there for pleasure two or three times in his life, unless you count Jersey. I seem to remember Victor and Patricia taking their children to the Channel Islands year after year.

It is, no doubt, peculiar that under these circumstances Victor should have chosen to make his living as a travel agent. Perhaps for him those journeys made in the imagination, undisturbed as they are by the inconveniences of reality – the lost travellers' cheques, the missed train, the disappointing weather – are enough in themselves, fulfilling and richly rewarding. I sometimes wonder.

Patricia, too, is very fond of the Lake District, but she would have liked to go abroad this year, just for a change. The weather is so depressing in England. Last year we barely saw the sun all summer. But, on the other hand, Patricia has no desire to fly. Aeroplanes, she says, are unnatural things. If God had intended us to fly… and so forth.

I sometimes wonder what Patricia has been thinking about all her life. Her endless ability to produce gloom-laden platitudes never ceases to amaze me.

Laurel, who is fat and rude and sulky and in her last year at school, looked sourly at her mother and said,

"Well, it looks like being the Lake District then, so you can count me out."

Victor wanted to know what other plans Laurel envisaged for herself and was filled with horror when she announced that she was planning to go hitch-hiking with friends on the Continent.

Patricia was in despair. There could be no question of Laurel doing anything of the sort. She would certainly be raped. 

To set the cat among the pigeons, Leo, who was probably bored, pointed out that if God hadn't meant Laurel to hitch-hike, he wouldn't have given her thumbs. Some unfortunate people, he had heard, were occasionally born without them. At last he understood why.

Patricia scowled at her son and told him not to be silly. Wasn't he worried about his sister being raped? He might have something sensible to say instead of just making futile jokes. Rape was a dreadful thing.

"She'll be all right if she keeps her wits about her," said Leo.

Laurel, who is a born again Christian, said that keeping her wits about her had nothing at all to do with it. She knew that Jesus would be hitch-hiking with her and Jesus would never allow her to be raped.

Leo was comforted by his sister's faith but curious to know by what arcane process of elimination or peculiarly divine logic Jesus finally selected the victims of rape.

Laurel decided to sulk.

To introduce a happier note to the proceedings, I asked Leo what he had been getting up to in London and whether he had any exciting plans for the future.

Whatever else may be said about gloomy Patricia, she is an excellent cook, so that by the time we had eaten our roast beef, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts followed by treacle tart and thick Jersey cream, everyone seemed to be in a mellower mood. Even Laurel looked as if she might be contemplating putting an end to her sulks.

The cheese was put on the table and although I could certainly eat no more, I was glad to see Leo help himself to a large slice of Cheddar. I always pretend not to notice that Leo has a habit of feeding Pansy under the table. Pansy loves cheese and Leo has a soft spot for Pansy for which I am grateful.

I did not stay long after lunch and wondered as I was driving home whether or not I would manage to get some writing done later, or if I was too tired. And then if I did manage to sit down and get out my pen, I supposed I would be interrupted by Eric. He was bound to call, I thought. 

But as it turned out, Eric did not call which was rather a nuisance in a way, because had I been sure that he wasn't coming, I would certainly have done some writing, but, as it was, I merely frittered away the evening, watching television and doing the
Sunday
Telegraph
crossword.

If Eric had come I would, of course, have offered him some supper, as I had a nice bit of cold ham in the fridge.

He may well not have come last night, but I don't doubt that he will be here today, just when I least need him so I will certainly not invite him to stay for a meal. For one thing I have nothing to give him now as I ate most of the ham last night myself and, apart from that, I have only a bit of stale cheese, not even a packet of soup to offer. Nothing else – no fruit, and no desire to go shopping.

It is bitterly cold outside, so I have built the fire up nicely and plan to stay inside in the warm. Pansy is curled up in her basket, obviously of the same opinion.

*

When the day dawned for Timothy to come to tea with me, I felt ridiculously nervous. I had a sort of feeling that perhaps he wouldn't turn up. He was obviously a shy boy and although he had agreed to come, he might easily think at the last minute that he wanted nothing to do with me. He might well have decided that my invitation represented an intrusion which to a certain extent of course, it did.

I had baked some biscuits the night before, and these I placed casually in an attractive tin on the edge of the kitchen table. I destroyed what I regarded as being the worst evidence of spinsterhood – that is to say that I purposefully left some books and a newspaper lying untidily on the dresser and a coat I left hanging over the back of a chair. Was I, I wondered, being a little foolish?

It seemed to me that I was not. I was about to entertain a shy and probably very unhappy boy. It was only natural that I should want to put him at his ease and how could a young boy be at his ease in a house which was meticulously tidy, reminding him, I supposed, of school and discipline? I wanted my house to feel like a home.

When I invited Timothy to tea I had murmured that I was worried about his work, but I had said that he might bring a friend. I had no intention of frightening the boy away although it is perfectly obvious that I could have discussed neither his work nor his state of mind in the presence of a third person.

I wondered whether, if he did come, he would bring the boy with whom I had seen him around during the previous year.

In the event, he came alone. He came nearly half an hour late, by which time, I have to admit, I was in a fever of anxiety, but he came alone.

When I eventually heard the front door bell ring I felt a quickening of the pulse. I caught my breath.

Why on earth, I wondered as I hurried to open the door, should I feel so acutely about this child. He was just another boy. Nothing to me. Probably just another lazy, rather dull boy.

I opened the door with what anyone would have described as a ridiculous grin on my face. I remember it now and I remember feeling tense and rather silly. My friends would have regarded that grin as being not only ridiculous but totally uncharacteristic. Luckily there was no one but Timothy to see me.

"Come in, come in… How nice to see you… I'm so glad you could come," I heard myself say in an animated voice as if I were receiving some elderly, illustrious visitor. I must try to relax. What on earth would the boy think of this dithering, middle-aged spinster?

All my nerves, I realised when I thought about it, were merely due to an over-anxious concern for this lonely, vulnerable, isolated boy. I had been thinking about him a great deal lately and no doubt all that thinking had just excited me. Once I had spoken to him I would feel altogether more relaxed. I only wanted this opportunity to gain his trust and to talk to him a little so as to see what he was really like – where his problems lay. There was nothing particularly odd about that. I felt sure that I could help him, if only he would let me. 

Timothy stepped awkwardly into my house.

"Sorry I'm late," he said gauchely, shuffling his feet.

I ushered him into the kitchen, begged him to sit down, offered him tea, coffee, biscuits, sugar, milk, bread, butter, jam, sorry no marmite, toast, gabbling nervously at what should have been a perfectly normal confrontation.

Somehow shy people have the ability to disconcert even the most self-possessed, making them speak foolishly and out of turn. In a minute Timothy would relax and we would be talking comfortably. Perhaps I should try, for a moment, to forget the role of mother which I didn't seem to be playing with any great aplomb, and revert to that of school-teacher.

By the time I had busied myself making tea and toast I had regained a certain amount of equanimity. Timothy, too, looked more at ease.

We talked about this and that, touching on the subject of whether he liked the school.

"Not much," he said gazing forlornly at the piece of buttered toast he held in his hand. "But it's probably no worse than any other."

"What about your house?" I dared to ask. "Do you get on with your housemaster?"

Suddenly he stared straight at me. Big, green, honest eyes.

"I hate him," he said. "He's a monster."

I have to admit that I was rather taken aback by the frankness and the sudden vehemence although not altogether surprised to know that that was how he felt. In my own opinion Timothy's housemaster was one of the most insensitive and uncouth of all the male teachers in the school. To be perfectly honest I had often wondered how he ever came to be put in charge of a house. Perhaps partly because of his wife who was a pleasant enough, apologetic sort of woman who would certainly be kinder to the boys than he would.