The Skull Beneath the Skin (7 page)

No school could have suited him better. He recognized that its traditions and occasionally bizarre rituals, which he quickly learned and sedulously observed, were designed as much to discourage too personal a commitment as to promote a corporate identity. He was tolerated but left alone, and he asked nothing more. Even his talents were acceptable to the ethos of the school, which, perhaps because of a strong personal antipathy between a nineteenth-century headmaster and Dr. Arnold of Rugby, by tradition eschewed muscular Christianity and almost all manifestations of the team spirit and espoused High Anglicanism and the cult of the eccentric. But music was well taught; the school’s two orchestras had a national reputation. And swimming, the only physical skill at which he excelled, was one of the more acceptable sports. Compared with the Norman Pagworth Comprehensive, Melhurst seemed to him a haven of civilized order. At Pagworth he had felt like an alien set down without a phrase book in a lawless, ill-governed and alien country whose
language and customs, crudely harsh as the playground in which they were born, were terrifyingly incomprehensible. The prospect of having to leave Melhurst and return to his old school had been one of his worst terrors since he began to sense that things were going wrong between himself and Clarissa.

It was strange that fear and gratitude should be so mixed. The gratitude was genuine enough. He only wished that he could experience it as it surely ought to be experienced, a graciousness, a reciprocal benison, free of this dragging load of obligation and guilt. The guilt was the worst to bear. When its weight became almost too much for him he tried to exorcise it by rational thought. It was ridiculous to feel guilty, ridiculous and unnecessary even to feel too oppressive an obligation. Clarissa owed him something after all. It was she who had destroyed his parents’ marriage, enticed away his father, helped kill his mother through grief, left him an orphan to endure the discomforts, the vulgarities, the suffocating boredom of his uncle’s house. It was Clarissa, not he, who should feel guilt.

But even to let this thought creep traitorously into his mind only increased his burden of obligation. He owed her so much. The trouble was that everyone knew just how much. Sir George, who was seldom there, but who, when he was, presented himself to Simon as a silent, accusing personification of all those masculine qualities which he knew were alien to his own personality. He sometimes sensed in Clarissa’s husband an inarticulate goodwill which he would have liked to have put to the test if only he could summon the courage. But most of the time he imagined that Sir George had never really approved of Clarissa taking him on and that their secret marital conversations were punctuated with the phrases: “I told
you so. I warned you.” Miss Tolgarth knew; Tolly whose eyes he dared not meet for fear of encountering one of those judgemental gazes in which he thought he detected dislike, resentment and contempt. Clarissa knew it, probably to the last penny. Increasingly he had come to feel that Clarissa repented of a generosity which at first had held all the charm of novelty, the magnificent gesture, superbly theatrical at the time in all its eccentricity but which she now saw had lumbered her with a spotty, inarticulate adolescent, ill at ease with her friends; with school bills, holiday arrangements, dental appointments, with all the minor irritations of motherhood and none of its essential compensations. He sensed that there was something she required of him which he could neither identify nor give, some return, unspecified but substantial which would one day be demanded of him with all the brutal insistence of a tax collector.

She seldom wrote to him now, and when he did see in his cubby hole that tall, curved hand—she disapproved of personal letters being typed—he had to steel himself to open the envelope. But the apprehension had never before been as bad as this. The letter seemed to have stuck to his hand, to have grown heavy with menace. And then the one o’clock bell clanged out. With sudden vehemence he tore at the corner of the envelope. The pale blue, linen-based paper which she always used was tough. He wrenched in his thumb and tore a jagged slit through envelope and letter, rough as a lover who cannot wait to know his fate. He saw that the letter was short and his immediate reaction was a moan of relief. If she were throwing him out, if there was to be no last term at Melhurst, no chance of a place at the Royal College of Music, no more allowance, surely the excuse, the justification would require more than half a page. But the first sentence did away with his worst fears.

It was odd how soon relief could change to a new and different anxiety, even to resentment. Reading the letter for the second time he wondered why he should have been invited to the island. It was Clarissa’s doing, of course. Ambrose Gorringe didn’t know him and would hardly be likely to include him among his guests if he did. He remembered vaguely having heard about the island, the restored Victorian theatre, the plans to stage the Webster tragedy, and he sensed that the performance was important to Clarissa, amateur production though it might be. But why should he be there? He was
expected to keep out of her way, not to make a nuisance of himself; that much was evident. He could disport himself in the sea or the pool. He supposed that there would be a pool and pictured Clarissa, pale and golden, stretched out in the sun and beside her this new girl, this Cordelia Gray with whom he was supposed to practise making conversation. And what else did Clarissa want him to practise? Making himself agreeable? Paying compliments? Knowing what jokes women like and when to make them? Flirting? Showing himself to be a susceptible heterosexual male? The prospect made his mouth dry with terror.

It wasn’t that he disliked the idea of a girl. He had already created in his mind the girl he would like to be with on Courcy Island—on any island; sensitive, beautiful, intelligent, kind and yet wanting him, wanting him to do to her those terrifyingly exciting and shameful things which would no longer be shameful because they loved each other, acts which would reconcile for him in sweet responsive flesh, finally and for ever, that dichotomy which so occupied his day-dreaming hours, between romanticism and desire. He didn’t expect to meet this girl, on Courcy or anywhere else. The only girl with whom he had so far had anything to do had been his cousin Susie. He hated Susie, hated her bold contemptuous eyes, her perpetually chewing mouth, her voice which alternately whined or yelled, her dyed hair, her grubby, beringed fingers.

But even if this girl were different, even if he liked her, how could he get to know her when Clarissa would be watching them, marking him for articulacy, attraction, wit, checking up on his social performance as she and this Ambrose Gorringe would be checking up on his musicianship? The reference to his music made his cheeks burn. He was insecure enough about his talent without having it diminished by this coy
reference to his “pieces” as if he were a child showing off to the neighbours at a suburban tea party. But the instruction was clear enough. He was to bring with him something showy or popular or both, something he could play with practised bravado so that she wouldn’t be disgraced by any nervous misfingerings and she and Ambrose Gorringe would together decide whether he had enough talent to justify a final year at school, a chance to try for a place at the Royal College or the Academy.

And suppose the verdict went against him? He couldn’t return to Mornington Avenue, to his aunt and uncle. Clarissa couldn’t do that to him. After all, it was she who had brought the order of release. She had arrived unannounced on a warm afternoon during the summer holidays, when he had been in the house alone as usual, reading at the sitting-room table. He couldn’t remember how she had announced herself, whether he had been told that the silent upright man with her was her new husband. But he remembered how she had looked, golden and effulgent, a cool, sweet-smelling miraculous vision who had immediately taken hold of his heart and his life as a rescuer might pluck a drowning child from the water and set him firmly on a sunlit rock. It had been too good to last, of course. But how marvellous in memory shone that long-dead summer afternoon.

“Are you happy here?”

“No.”

“I don’t see how you could be, actually. This room’s pretty gruesome. I’ve read somewhere that a million copies of that print have been sold but I didn’t realize people actually hung it on their walls. Your father told me that you were musical. Do you still play?”

“I can’t. There isn’t a piano here. And they only teach percussion at school. They have a West Indian steel band. They’re only interested in music where everyone can join in.”

“Things which everyone can join in usually aren’t worth doing. They shouldn’t have put two different papers on the walls. Three or four might have been bizarre enough to be fun. Two are just vulgar. How old are you? Fourteen, isn’t it? How would you like to come and live with us?”

“For always?”

“Nothing is for always. But perhaps. Until you grow up, anyway.”

Without waiting for his reply, without even looking into his face to watch his initial response she turned to the silent man at her side.

“I think we can do better than this for Martin’s boy.”

“If you are sure, my dear. Not a thing to decide quickly. Shouldn’t make an impulse buy of a child.”

“Darling, where would you be if I hadn’t made an impulse buy? And he’s the only son I’m ever likely to give you.”

Simon’s eyes were turning from one face to the other. He remembered how Sir George had looked, the features stiffening as if the muscles were bracing themselves against pain, against vulgarity. But Simon had seen the hurt, visible, unmistakable, before Sir George had turned silently away.

She had turned to him.

“Will your aunt and uncle mind?”

The misery, the grievances, had spilled out. He had had to prevent himself from clutching at her dress.

“They won’t care! They’ll be glad! I take up the spare room and I haven’t any money. They’re always telling me how much it costs to feed me. And they don’t like me. They won’t mind, honestly.”

And then, on impulse, he had done the right thing. It was the only time he had done exactly the right thing where Clarissa was concerned. There had been a pink geranium in a
pot on the window-ledge; his uncle was a keen gardener and grew cuttings in the lean- to greenhouse at the side of the kitchen. One of the flower heads was small and delicate as a rose. He had broken it off and handed it to her; looking up into her face. She had laughed aloud and taken it from him and slipped it into the belt of her dress. Then she had looked at her husband and had laughed again, a peal of happy triumph.

“Well that seems to have decided itself. We’d better stay until they come home. I can’t wait to see the owners of this wallpaper. And then we’ll take you to buy some clothes.”

And so, with such promise, in such an exhilaration of surprised joy, it had all begun. He tried now to recall when the dream had faded, when things had first started to go wrong. But, apart from the first meeting, had they ever really gone right? He sensed that he was worse than a failure, that he was the last of a series of failures, that earlier disappointments had reinforced her present discontent. He was beginning to dread the holidays although he saw little either of Clarissa or of Sir George. Their official life together, such as it was, was lived in the London flat overlooking Hyde Park. But they were seldom there together. Clarissa had a flat in a Regency square in Brighton, her husband a remote flint cottage on the marshes of the east coast. It was there that their real lives were lived, she in the company of her theatrical friends, he in bird-watching and, if rumour were correct, in right-wing conspiracy. Simon had never been invited to either place although he often pictured them in those other secret worlds, Clarissa in a whirl of gaiety, Sir George conferring with his mysterious, hard-faced and nameless confederates. For some unexplainable reason, these imaginings, which occupied a disproportionate part of his holiday hours, were in the guise of old films. Clarissa and her friends, dressed in the waistless shifts of the twenties, hair shingled and flourishing long
cigarette holders, flung out their legs in a hectic Charleston while Sir George’s friends arrived at their rendezvous in veteran cars, trench-coated, their wide-brimmed trilbys pulled down over secretive eyes. Excluded from both these worlds, Simon spent the holidays in the Bayswater flat, looked after occasionally by an almost silent Tolly or coping on his own, eating his dinner each night, by arrangement, in a local restaurant. Recently the meals had become poorer, dishes he chose were no longer available although they were served to others, he was shown to the worst table and kept waiting. Some of the waiters were almost openly offensive. He knew that Clarissa was no longer getting value for money, but he dared not complain. Who was he, so expensively bought and maintained, to talk about value for money?

It was time to go if he wanted any luncheon. He crumpled the letter in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket. Shutting his eyes against the brightness of grass and trees and shimmering water, he found himself praying, petitioning the God in whom he no longer believed, with all the desperate urgency, all the artless importunity of a child.