The Pritchett Century (73 page)

The Major and his wife strolled away, and Benedict and I were left alone. I picked up the garden fork and tried to dig. “Don’t do that,” he said, and pulled the fork from me, rather frightened. “It’s boring,” he said.

It was a lazy morning, one of those long mornings—how long they are when one is young—when you wander about and every minute is as long as an hour.

“I’m going to see the dead bird,” he said at last.

I did not want to go home. I thought, This is where I want to stay, so I followed him. We crossed the hedge into the water meadow, where the air was cool, and listened to the swish of our shoes against the wiry grass and watched the insects jump away and stopped to listen to the larks singing like electric bells high up in the sky and tried to see them, and we seemed to walk from one electric bell to another. Like Benedict I was playing at running away. First he went ahead fast, but I soon caught up and passed him.

“Beat you,” I said, and rumpled his head as I passed. He began to chase me. We passed the end of the wood where the dead bird was and got across the stream, where we messed about with sticks in the water and startled birds. Then we began to climb. I wanted to get to the top of the barrow, but it was longer and higher than I had imagined it would be. The view grew wider and wider and went on for miles, and there was no sound now. We were high above the singing larks. I could see our house and Benedict’s standing quiet with the sun on them. We stopped and sat down. We were sitting on the bones of people who had died
millions
of years ago. There was no sound here except the wind, but then we heard the baaing of a ram. It sounded to me like the voice
of a buried man, but I did not say this. We got up from where we were sitting and looked for it but could see nothing. The sound must have come from the ram far below. I nearly said, “The heights! How I love them!” but I didn’t. Benedict, I thought, is too young; I was centuries older than he was. I wanted to stay there for ever—not with Benedict but, say, with Augusta’s brother, and when we stood for a last look on the miles of flat fields and clumps of trees where there would be a church tower and little houses on the far side, with a road wriggling round a wood, I wanted to go there, too. Suddenly—I don’t know why—thinking of Augusta’s brother, I marched up to Benedict and kissed him and ran off. He didn’t like this and picked up a thorny stick and chased after me.

I stopped. “Why do you run away from school?” I asked severely.

“I hate it,” he said at once. “It’s boring. I’m not going back.”

The Devil was there, he went on. Benedict and the Devil! The Devil was dressed in red, he said. This time the Devil was the man who taught music there at his school. He was ignorant, stupid.

It was getting late. We went stumbling down the steep path, and as we got lower I could hear the skylarks again, no higher than my shoulder but far out over the fields below. I could almost have caught one of them.

When we got down to the meadow Benedict was angry when I said I had to get back home. “Stay, stay,” he said, “I’ll let you dig.” But I said no, I didn’t want to dig. He followed me across the meadow to our hedge, still saying “Stay.” I said I had to pack up and go back to school in the afternoon. When I got through the hedge and called out “Goodbye,” he shouted “I hate you!” I saw him walking away and then suddenly he ran and then he was out of sight. I don’t know why I kissed him when we were on the barrow.

Everything changed at my school in Newford after that party at Lower Marsh. Augusta, who was a good deal older than I and taller, had never taken much notice of me, but now she came floating round me like a swan. She had long golden hair and large grey dreaming eyes that narrowed and dwelled on you in an inspecting way. She said, “I didn’t know you knew the Shorts,” in a way that suggested I had hidden a secret from her. Her voice seemed to float on romantic secrets.
She was also our chief mimic and gossip. She’d do Mrs Figg’s sarcastic voice, and she knew which teacher was in love with an old don at Oxford who was married. She called two girls who doted on the art master “Picasso’s Doves,” and the headmistress “the blessed St Agnes.” To be with her was like reading a novel in serial parts; she paused and we knew there were chapters to come.

I told her that we did not really know the Shorts, though my mother, I thought, often met Mrs Short at a musical quartet at Newford.

She narrowed her questioning eyes. “I adore Glan and Emma, don’t you?”

And before I knew what I was saying I said there was some trouble about fir trees.

“Fir trees!” said Augusta with a laugh that egged me to go on, but I had come to a lame end.

We were going into supper and Mrs Figg passed us. “Don’t dawdle, Sarah,” she said.

I was not a dawdling girl, and I saw that I must have been copying Augusta’s dawdling walk. It was new to me, and I felt I had grown up several months. As we separated and went to our different tables Augusta said, off-hand, “Of course, Benedict’s quite mad. My father says it goes back to that awful pious nurse he had. She used to tell him that the Devil would get him and that he would go to hell. And then there was that awful Webb business.” And, with that, she glided away.

But the phrase “that awful Webb business” and Augusta walking away with her I-know-more-than-you-do look made me dog Augusta whenever I could. And I could see by her face that she noticed this. We went off the next day to play tennis on the school court. She was a slapdash tennis player, and even the few balls that came over the net seemed to know something. When we left the court and went to our dormitory to change I said, “My father didn’t cut down those fir trees. It was old Webby who used to work for the Shorts as well as for us.”

Augusta stood there with her blouse off. Her grown-up breasts, larger than mine, seemed to be staring at me. The bell rang and we hadn’t washed.

“Run along,” she said. “Actually,” she said—we all said “actually” in a cutting way in those days—“I was talking about Glanville’s first wife. She died years ago. She drowned.”

I felt I was like some silly fish dangling on a hook in hot air. I could not breathe.

“Come along, girls,” Mrs Figg called from the door of the dormitory. I choked my way into my clothes. I sluiced my face and through the water I saw the astonishing stone face of the drowning Webb in the drawing room at Lower Marsh.

Poor Benedict, I thought, and I ran down the clattering stairs to the dining room. I mumbled my way through grace and saw Augusta across the room saying grace beautifully, her lovely chin raised. Later she ate slowly, while I was racing through my food and spilled my milk. I was still wriggling on Augusta’s hook. I was in her power.

But Augusta was merciful to me, or else, I suppose, she saw the kind of opportunity she loved. If she was dreamy, she was also crisp.

In our free time it was easy for girls to be in twos, lying in the grass, and at last I was able to say, “Poor Benedict, his mother drowned.” This explained the strange things he did, and his talk of the body in the room.

“I did not say that,” said Augusta scornfully. “Emma is his mother. Glan was married to Webb.
Then
he married Emma. What a thing to say! Did your father say that? If he did, it’s very wicked,” she said sharply.

I said no, he’d never said anything like that, nor my mother, I swore. Augusta was still suspicious of this, but at last she saw how confused I was, and she forgave me. She said that Glanville had married a Miss Webb when he came home after the First World War; everyone was mad about her. It was not until much later that I began to wonder how Augusta knew the story. It must have happened
before
the war and she wasn’t born then. But she said that Webb had gone off to Egypt with a painter called Stolz and that he had left her, and so she had come home and drowned herself in the river at Fordhampton.

The one where father can’t afford to fish, I thought. And then I thought of Benedict digging a grave for Pharaoh and his wife in his garden.

I had already told Augusta about this the day after Cocky Olly, but when I mentioned it again now, Augusta cut the story short. “That boy is always digging,” she said. “He wants to be an archaeologist, like that man in Glanville’s library.” And she said dreamily, “I would never be a second wife, unless he was like Glanville.”

We got up from the grass laughing. I mean,
I
laughed; Augusta didn’t. Anyway, she said, Emma and Glan were sending Benedict to the grammar school in Newford. That would stop him running away because he’d come home every day by train. And she gave me one of her narrow-eyed looks. The Shorts were her possession.

The long holidays began. My father took us to Devonshire to stay in a hotel near a place where he went fishing. Mother and I went on long walks, and the only event of the day was to come back by the bridge over the river to catch sight of him. We were not allowed to go near him when he was fishing. Once or twice we drove ten miles to a high red-faced cliff—they were not chalky cliffs as they are in our part of the country. The waves were forever staining the sand red near the shore. We used to park on the cliff with other cars and walk not too near the edge and look at the sea glittering some days and on others tumbling fast down the Channel. I loved the Channel because it was wider here. This was the only time I thought of the Shorts and Benedict, for they were in Brittany.
La mer:
what a beautiful word! We had a set book by Pierre Loti to read in the holidays. My mother said she, too, had had to read it at school when she was a girl, yet she was no help with the words I didn’t know.

So, back home again. It seemed dull. I rushed to my post at the end of our garden and looked across the water meadow, but there was no sight of Benedict on the first day. In the middle of the week I did see him in the distance with a girl taller than he and making for his house. I waved. They did not see me, and I tried to make myself look larger when they came into closer view. I waved again. They still did not see me. I felt something like a red-hot electric wire run through me—a wire that seemed to turn into a flame, as if I were alight. Then I went icy cold. Benedict was with Augusta! I was flaming with jealousy. I watched till they went out of sight.

My father was in the garden talking to my mother, who was pulling up weeds. I got carried away and went out to the road and walked along to the Shorts’ drive. There were cars outside the house, one of them Foxey’s red car. A party. And I wasn’t invited. I was stiff with misery. I went back to my room and tried to read, but I was listening, for hours it seemed to me, to hear the cars drive away. When I went to bed my jealousy went. I remembered that the next week I would see Benedict on the train to and from school.

But at first this was not so. On the first day of term Augusta told me that Benedict’s mother was going to drive him to his grammar school and bring him back each day. So I became a parcel again on my weekly journey. On Monday mornings I saw the politician doing his morning trot up and down the platform, and weekend people going to London with their papers, and a few grammar-school boys who got in at King’s Mill and played cards all the way. Their school caps had a yellow ring round them. On Saturday afternoons there was always a large crowd of them going back to their homes in King’s Mill or Fordhampton. About a dozen of them would stand on the platform bashing one another with their cases, and cheeking the woman who ran the buffet. Sometimes she turned them out. They crowded round the slot machines and tried to force them to yield up coins. I used to sit on a seat watching them. The porters grinned at the boys, but the ticket inspector hated the way they pushed past him. Sometimes a boy would be pushed onto my seat and I would walk away higher up the platform. There was a fat boy who was always eating chocolate.

The first Saturday I saw Benedict on the platform, he was keeping clear of the other boys. “Hullo,” he said eagerly in his high voice, and the fat boy mocked, “Squeaky’s got a little t-tart.”

They stared at us and then went on pushing one another around. Benedict was carrying his violin case. I had never seen that before. I asked him why he wasn’t wearing the school cap.

“Because I hate it,” he said.

I can’t remember what we talked about except that I told him that I had seen him with an old lady walking across the water meadow and had waved to him. He was startled.

“A witch,” he said.

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It was Augusta. Don’t tell her I said that.”

“I’ll tell,” he said.

I knew he would, because every now and then after our train came in and we took our seats he said, “I’ll tell, I’ll tell.”

At Fordhampton, Glan was waiting for him, and my mother was there as well.

“Aha!” said Glanville in his insinuating way. “The apple girl.”

“It seems damn silly,” said my father to my mother when I got home. “Why couldn’t he have given Sarah a lift and saved you the trouble? Save petrol, too. Typical socialist.”

“You don’t give the boy a lift,” Mother said.

“Don’t be an owl,” Father said. “That man’s got nothing to do.”