The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (11 page)

She said why didn't I call her Virginia in the holidays? She hoped we could meet again. I grasped the opportunity and asked her if we could meet again the next week. Well, she was going to have to go to London for a few days, but she'd drop me a note.

I thought it was the brush-off. She clutched my hand under the table, drew it on to her knee, smiled lovingly at me, said that she really would write. ‘Don't you believe I will?'

‘I do believe you will.'

‘Honestly I will, love. But I have to go up to London to appear in court – one of my best friends is involved in a divorce case, and I am a star witness.'

‘You lead such an exciting life, Virginia!'

‘Divorce is not exciting – it's just cruel. What's the most exciting thing you've ever done, Horatio?'

I told her about the time Nelson and I had been chased by hornets at Hunstanton, and how we had jumped into the sea with all our clothes on to escape from them. Virginia and I both laughed greatly. She was wonderful company.

When she drove me back to our front door, again the agony of crisis. I stared at her. She kissed me fleetingly, just brushing her lips against mine. ‘See you soon!'

They asked to look at my sketches as I hurried up to my bedroom.

‘I left 'em at Traven Castle,' I said.

My last term at Branwells, although I did not know it then: Summer term, 1939. I thought I had another year to go and Higher School Cert before me. It was the only term I went back eagerly. I knew I was going to see Virginia.

Our second meeting had miraculously come off. She had been as good as her darling word. We had done much as the first time, and had even managed a brief sort of half-cuddle and a long kiss before parting. Virginia had kissed me! Virginia Traven had kissed me!

At Branwells she seemed only a little more distant, but I realized that if we were going to be lovers, then both sides must exercise caution.

I was made prefect at the beginning of term. This gave me extra freedom. It meant that one could walk about the school on one's own without being questioned, an unheard-of luxury. It also meant that one had a study of one's own in what was called Prosser's Row – a privilege that gave one many sexual advantages, although it is fair to say that few of the prefects took advantage of this, or not very often. We agreed that we were much more civilized than the louts who had been prefects when we arrived as new boys, so long, long before.

Frank Richards was now put behind me. Greyfriars had palled at last. I had talked with Nelson and a friend of ours at home about socialism – somewhat to my surprise, they both declared themselves to be socialists – and Nelson was going out with a girl who called herself socialist (his engagement to Catharine had been broken off or, more accurately, had faded into thin air). I read all about socialism and the less boring bits of politics in the school library. I also happened on Keats and other poets – splendid fellows, I now discovered, who threw a few sidelights on what was happening between Virginia and me. In short, I was becoming civilized.

I was also working hard for School Cert. All that nightmare, the outward climax of one's school career, is so dead now that I have no intention of reviving it here. I passed it creditably, and that was the end of it. It was a bore at the time; it bores me now. Whereas Virginia still interests me.

It should not be imagined that the favourite school interest was dead to me. The cess-pit was still on the boil, as one might say. I now had the pleasure of finding that Brown slept only a few beds away from me in the dorm – to Webster's comic jealousy: ‘I'll see they get
you
, old man, on that glorious day when the bloody revolution dawns!'

Brown had his adventure to relate. He claimed that in the holidays the gardener caught him trying to toss the family chow off in the asparagus patch, and had taken him into the potting shed, there inducing him to try the same tactics on what Brown described as a very large Hampden indeed.

Such tales, some true, some partially true, some wishful thinking, some downright lies, went the rounds at the start of every term; the lies sank and were forgotten, the truths survived and were welcome. Drury described how he had screwed his sister. We knew Drury screwed his sister; we had heard it from him before; he always came up with a wealth of detail, and there was not a boy did not envy him. Harper Junior claimed that his mother had got drunk and had sucked him off. We ignored Harper Junior.

I found I was growing secretive. Whereas, before this term, I had made much of my intentions towards Virginia – Sister Traven, as she again became during term – I now affected lack of interest in the whole matter, or I affected interest of a lewd and joking kind, to cover my real feelings. This acting role I had adopted at home, to protect myself from derision; it worked so well and for so long that I was eventually hard put to it to drop it, or even to determine my real feelings myself.

Similarly, I said nothing to anyone about Esmeralda, except once to Brown, when I told him he manipulated me almost as voluptuously as she did (for the knack of voluptuousness, or gift if it is that, never comes to some men or women; indeed, I believe it is a rarity, at least in northern Europe). Esmeralda and I had reached a truce, and a very agreeable one it was. We were both put off actually going all the way with each other, but on several occasions in the holidays we had got together and frigged each other in the friendliest way.

After her first burst of generosity in letting me have a good look at her fanny, Esmeralda was inclined to be much more frugal. ‘It isn't supposed to be stared at,' she said.

I was, however, in a good bargaining position. Esmeralda wanted to see exactly how I worked.

Our favourite position was lying on our sides on her bed with Esmeralda behind me, looking over at my prick as she tossed it off, cunningly varying the pace, until I groaned and came into my outspread handkerchief. All this while, I had a hand clamped between her chubby legs. I would then roll her on to her back, make her spread wide her legs, and give her a reciprocal frigging.

She always came very quickly. The perfume of her private parts was beautiful to me; later in life, when I was more experienced, I would not have resisted the impulse to indulge my sense of taste as well as smell. At the time it was enough to enjoy her friendly animal company, and see her, satisfied, lie back and smile, and perhaps put a finger gently on her clitoris, to relish the last lingering feeling there.

Given the chance, I was a loving person. Sharing sexual experience with anyone always made me feel great affection for them; undoubtedly, I would have been absolutely crazy about Esmeralda, had it not been for the fateful attachment I felt for Sister. And I suppose a base general law was operating: Esmeralda had yielded, whereas Sister still promised …

Only a few months earlier, the intimacies with Esmeralda would have been the peak of bliss. In many ways they still were; and for several days after term had begun I still kidded myself I could smell her blessed scent under one fingernail; but my love for Sister Traven was a higher peak.

Fortune sides with you if you give it a chance. My chance came early in the term. I was down to play with the first eleven against North Malverton, old rivals of ours. It was my first game in the first eleven, and I was conscious of the honour.

When the day came, I awoke feeling horribly ill. Whatever I had, it had been coming on for the two previous days. I told Page, the team captain, but he would not drop me. As long as I was on my feet, he preferred me to Bellarmine, who was twelfth man.

We fielded first. It was a hot day for May. I stood at square leg, and the field swam about me. I seemed to be talking to myself.

The Malverton captain – I forget his name now, but he had a moustache – had put himself to bat first. His score stood at forty-eight, and no wickets had fallen, when he hit the ball in my direction. I saw it coming, on its erratic course through the air, a nasty little red thing, growing, growing, eluding any attempt to catch it. It caught me smack on the forehead, above the left eye. They told me afterwards I made no attempt to lift my hands to it at all. Field, cricketers, sky – all spun away into blackness.

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.