A warm welcome to new subscribers! I’m so happy you’re here. Things are hotting up in Helensburgh… Dora’s present day life is not so perfect in Paradise and in 1930 Wystan finds life as a schoolmaster very challenging. I hope you enjoy Larchfield — and please tell your friends! You can catch up with all episodes by clicking the button at the end of the extract and revisit the previous episode just below.
Previously in LARCHFIELD: Wystan grapples with malt whisky and Larchfield’s suspicious benefactor, Wallace. His loneliness is so intense he visits Christopher Isherwood in Berlin for a chance to enjoy some night life in the gay bars of the city. Meanwhile Dora performs an extraordinary everyday act of mother love, and finds herself drawn to present day Larchfield, as if the poet is calling her…
Return to Episode Four:
EPISODE FIVE: In which Dora’s friends, who know her as RJ, come to visit from London and she struggles to remember who she used to be. Harriet, a lady from the Church, interferes. In 1930, Wystans first book of poems is published, he struggles with the boredom of his pupils and longs for his friends.
Chapter fourteen
Dora
Into her cloistered, claustrophobic life, emails came, still addressed to RJ. This was the name she wrote under, having had, in her youth, the notion that initials made one appear more serious and took away the baggage of identity. It worked for many writers: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, J. K. Rowling . . . In her case, the initials – which stood alone and did not refer to actual names – had stuck as a name in themselves, and it was this by which her friends in her professional life came to know her.
Dora looked at the emails on the screen, unsure if she was legitimately entitled, anymore, to respond. Dear RJ, they said. What are you writing? How are you? How are the maniacs upstairs?
They’ve moved into my head, she began to write, then deleted. And they never sleep.
It was as Dora that she cared for her baby, trudging dutifully to baby group, walking for miles along the forestry tracks and shores with the warm little body strapped to her chest. It was Dora who waited until the weekend, when Kit was around and would drive them somewhere, anywhere, and she could spend money on useless com- modities that reminded her that, as a consumer, at least, she existed. As the poet W. H. Auden said (Dora was becoming something of an expert on him now), we need the courage to choose ourselves. But it had become clear that either RJ or Dora had chosen, or been compelled to choose, something else. What else is there to do when a woman is all grown up?
Why don’t we all come and see you? the emails insisted quietly. Whom did they want to come and see? Dora could not locate RJ anymore. Her friends would be disappointed. They had never met Dora. And none of them had a baby or was married. Her friends, in fact, were strangers. Perhaps it had always been so. Perhaps they had never known her at all.
She thought of Auden and his tight circle of friends, the letters winging back and forth throughout his time in Helensburgh. His lifelong friendship with Christopher meant that, no matter how isolated he was, there was someone he could refer back to, someone who could remind him of who he was.
So . . . perhaps these people were her real friends, trying to reach her. The trouble was she did not know how to articulate what had happened to her in a way that they would understand.
Each day was enormous. It seemed impossible to traverse, so, often, Dora did not try, simply floating into it on the sofa, with her gurgling baby on her knee. And, surrounding her raft, the endless banging and music from upstairs, the revving of cars and slamming of doors, and – what was worse for being indefinable – Mo’s hatred seeping through the walls and the ceiling.
Okay, why not? Good to see you, she wrote, finally. What else was there to say? Dora scrutinised the message, over and over; did it sound as nonchalant as she wished it to? Even if she knew she had made some kind of massive mistake, she didn’t want her friends to think so – to pity her.
And so they came, driving up together from London, a place so far away in every way that it was another world. Here they were, miraculously unfolding from the car: two women and a man, all immaculately themselves.
‘Fuck me,’ said Steph, looking out wonderingly over the lawn and the glittering ocean. Dora had known Steph since they were undergraduates together and she was now a successful academic and scholar of the moderns. She turned to Dora and said, ‘How are you, gorgeous?’
Steph called almost everyone gorgeous. It was not to be taken seriously. And it bore no relation to how Dora actually looked. She had been waiting for hours. She’d changed her clothes several times, but there was no getting away from it: she looked completely different from the woman they knew. A few months previously, she had thrown out or sold on eBay all her ‘RJ’ clothes: the dresses and jackets for readings, the nice shoes. She wore anything now; she really wasn’t particular.
But they looked just the same. How clean and well groomed they were – had Dora been like that once? How substantial they were. She looked at them with terrible longing.
‘RJ,’ said the other woman, Tracey. She was younger than Dora, and had abandoned poetry to become a successful playwright. Dora didn’t react. ‘RJ!’ She prodded Dora and, with a jolt, Dora realised this was her name. She smiled and they embraced. Dora found herself inhaling the scent of her friend’s hair, as she did her baby’s. She clung on a fraction longer than the closeness of their friendship warranted, a little afraid of being unable to speak.
‘I get it now – I see why you live here,’ said the man, Martin. He was the poet of the group, uncompromisingly eking an existence on the fringes of fashionable literary London. He had kept his northern accent (Dora had jettisoned hers at the first opportunity) and was wearing much the same student outfit as he had worn throughout their acquaintance. This had begun when their first books came out with the same publisher. Martin was the one to warn her about all this: her marriage, her move far away and, most of all, her baby. You know what all that means, don’t you? he’d said. You’ll become a housewife, and no one wants to read housewife poetry.
But now he was advancing on her, smiling broadly. ‘Good to see you, RJ,’ he said softly. His body against hers felt electric. No one but Kit or Beatrice had touched her for such a long time.
The Divines were, by a miracle, out, although who knew when they would be back.
Dora said politely, ‘It’s so lovely you’ve come,’ then she blushed at how weirdly formal she sounded, and pressed on: ‘Yes, it’s so lovely, isn’t it?’ (Oh, God. Dora never said the word lovely, ever – it was as meaningless as nice – and here she had said it twice in the space of five seconds.) But, as they all stood in silence for a moment, looking out at the view, she knew that they all knew it was beyond lovely; it was where that word lost its meaning. It was another world, and Dora had gone there never to return. If she had a sense of humour, she might have joked that she had indeed died and gone to Paradise.
‘Come on in and see everyone,’ she said. ‘You must be dying for a drink after that drive.’ With her friends there, jostling, filling the air with friendly noise, Dora wanted to explain about her life, but the words eluded her. Would they even understand?
Kit had an apron on and his sleeves rolled up; he was making dinner and taking care of Beatrice so that Dora could enjoy this visit from her friends. He was quite unconscious of the vision he presented to the urban young people. They stared and Steph said clumsily, ‘So . . . busy in the kitchen, Kit?’
Dora’s husband grinned happily. ‘Well, yes, I am, actually. Whipping something up for you all. Dora . . . Dora is so pleased to see you.’ He winked at his wife and disappeared back into the kitchen.
The baby clearly alarmed them. Tracey held her like a bomb and handed her back. The other two made admiring noises and then drifted out of the room to gaze once more over the pulsing sea. So Dora put her back in the bouncer in the kitchen doorway and fol- lowed her friends down to the beach, where the sun was staging an incredible wintery show.
They cracked open some beers on the shore and swapped stories of their writing and their times together. Her friends were making a good effort at hiding their pity, but she knew it was there. The other-worldliness of the setting merely decorated the stark truth that she had left intellectual and artistic life behind to have a baby. It was disappointing, she knew. Had she not known that to go to another place, so far from London – instead of doing as they had done, travelling to London – was career suicide? That to have a baby was a lifestyle choice that would render her uninteresting?
Martin had indeed tried to warn her, but Dora had dismissed him as jealous. In her arrogance, she had thought that the rule did not apply to her. In so far as she had considered the unspoken rule at all, she had known she was different, that she was a writer first and all that other stuff second. As she liked to quote Charlotte Brontë, privately, in pencil, in her notebook: I am neither man nor woman, but an Author.
They filled her in on their lives. Steph had a high-profile posi- tion at UCL. She was on the radio quite a lot, talking about poetry. Tracey was getting married to her writer boyfriend next year. They would move into his studio flat. She would be able to work, she was sure, if he kept the TV down. She was teaching a lot, but living in London was so expensive, there was no choice. And Martin was much the same, possibly drinking a little more, definitely looking older. But he was publishing, he was writing. He was definitely in the swim.
Listening to their stories, Dora realised it was not distance that separated them, nor age.
She drained a second bottle and laughed when they did.
Dora had made real, hard choices, and they had not.
Had she lacked courage? Had she, in fact, betrayed herself?
Talking with them, she missed her old self – deeply, painfully, like a friend. She felt grief pressing in on the afternoon.
It was growing too cold. She beckoned them in, to where Kit had got the sitting room toasty warm and Beatrice grinned and burbled in her playpen. Dora felt her friends’ incomprehension of her life, and it rankled. Did they think she wanted to reverse everything? Did they think she wanted their lives? Beatrice was what Dora had now,
instead of participation in the world. Beatrice was her explanation for everything. Unfortunately, it was an explanation that had no words. Steph enquired politely about her life here. How was married life? How were the neighbours? Dora played it all down. How could she tell them how terrible everything was, and that she could never in a million years leave? It made no sense. Dora remembered how, as a younger woman, she had scoffed at Brief Encounter and The Bridges of Madison County – the heroines who turned their backs on true love for a life crushingly unfulfilled. Feeble, she had thought. Unrealistic. And now she could not see those films again because she under- stood them completely. The stilted language, the overblown sentiment – they absolutely broke her heart.
While she talked with her friends, answering their questions with superficial cheeriness, her mind stumbled over the rocks of what was now true.
Dora had love in her life where she had not had it before: love that she felt for her tiny family and love that she felt back from them. It was love that rooted her into the world; looking at her friends, she wondered how it was that they did not float away.
This was it.
Her dearest friends knew nothing; what life was really about, what it really cost.
Dora brushed away tears brimming in her eyes. She caught Martin looking at her with a sharp, kind look. Don’t say a fucking thing, she yelled at him wordlessly. He held her gaze until she broke it and she heard his words in her head: You’re struggling, aren’t you?
NO. Dora Fielding was not struggling. She had a name, though she kept forgetting it, and three people had travelled up from London to see her, which proved she existed. She was becoming aware of the full ramifications of her decision, that was all. She was becoming aware of the rock-hard truth about life.
‘It’s a relief to be out of all that, in a way,’ she managed, in response to a conversation about the unrestrained ruthlessness one writer had shown another. The three of them nodded sagely and completely without conviction.
‘I bet it is,’ said Steph, though a follow-up to this was beyond her. ‘The thing is, I know how it sounds, but I couldn’t manage without being able to buy an overpriced, but very good, cappuccino. Go on – call me what you like. But it symbolises the problem.’
‘I understand what you mean,’ said Dora. ‘Though we do have Costa.’ They laughed uproariously, but actually Dora was sincere. Thankfully, Kit distracted everyone by coming in to let Dora kiss Beatrice before he took her up to bed.
A short time later, he produced dinner. He sat at the head of the table, like the head of the family, a man among children. Dora’s friends paid him polite respect, as they did their own parents.
He said, ‘Dora’ this and ‘Dora’ that. So proud of her, he thought they knew her. The name clipped at their ears like a teacher and they exchanged glances.
He tried to tell them a little of what Dora had been doing since she had moved to Helensburgh. ‘W. H. Auden was here, you know,’ he said. ‘Dora is going to write about it.’
‘Auden? Here?’ Steph sat upright.
‘No mistake . . . and Dora is writing about him.’
Steph’s expression was a comical mixture of delight at this turn
of events and – this pleased Dora immensely – envy. ‘RJ! You lucky dog, stumbling on to something like that. And I bet no one has even touched it before. It’ll be virgin Auden territory.’
‘Yes. I don’t think anyone can be bothered to come here.’
‘Was it for long? The agape moment was after it, wasn’t it?’
‘It was two and a half years. He wrote The Orators here,’ said Dora proudly.
‘When you’ve researched it all, you should come down to the university and talk to us,’ said Steph. She was still looking at her with a kind of wonder.
Tracey said, ‘I wanted to write a play about Rimbaud and Ver- laine, but it was impossible – information overload, and impossible to find something new to say. You’re very lucky . . . This wonderful place . . . your delightful husband –’ here, she smiled with exaggerated coyness at Kit – ‘and now this! Maybe I’ll move up here.’
‘You’d last five seconds,’ said Martin.
‘Rubbish! I’m very adaptable.’
‘Remember when we went to that weird festival in Dubrovnik?
And you couldn’t work out how to open the minibar? I thought you were going to have a brain haemorrhage.’
They laughed together, a group of friends to which RJ had now returned. Tracey gave Martin the finger. The conversation moved gaily on. At last, Kit tired of the reminiscing and excused himself to go to bed, and Dora went to get her guitar. As she got up from the table, she saw the lights of the Divines’ car glow behind the curtains. They were back.
‘Is that the mad neighbours?’ Tracey asked.
‘Can either of them sing? They could join our band,’ said Steph. At that moment, nothing could disturb Dora’s happiness. She was RJ again with her friends, and Mo and Terrence were just mad old people who were not of significance. She gave the guitar to Steph, who was the best player among them, and the friends decamped to the sitting room for the sing-song they had ended so many evenings with before.
They had run through a couple of their favourite songs when the telephone rang. Dora stopped mid-chorus and rushed out into the hall to intercept the deafening ring.
‘Aye, this is Terrence Divine. Stop the racket, please.’
Racket? They were singing a few songs with an acoustic guitar. It was the first time she’d been up past ten since the baby was born. ‘It’s a few friends I haven’t seen for a long while. We’re not singing loudly.’
‘You’ve woken us up.’
‘You’ve been out all evening.’
‘We’re back now.’
She could hear her friends starting up ‘I’ll Follow the Sun’ in the other room. She felt RJ’s urge to return to them.
‘Terrence, can’t you just . . . sod off!’ she said and hung up, then left the phone off the hook. Swept up in her friends, she swiftly forgot the exchange. For a little while longer, RJ sang her harmonies until it was time for her friends to head off to the little B & B they had booked. It was an evening that Dora would always remember, bathing her in friendship.
She woke in the morning with new energy. After Bea had been fed and Kit waved off to work and effusive goodbye texts shared with her friends, Dora went into the spare room and took out her poetry collection and read it. While her baby slept, she fell into the world she had created all those years ago, as fully and completely as if she were encountering the poems for the first time. She heard her voice, RJ’s voice, reading the poems and she read back through some of the journals in her boxes to remind her of the things RJ had done. It was secret and joyful. She forgot about Dora . . . Dora, with her down- in-the-mouth face, her philosophical confusion about Brief Encounter, her social ineptitude, her silence. Dora was RJ again. It might just last.
There was a knock at the door. On the doorstep was an elderly woman whom Dora did not recognise. She had the brittle elegance of a wealthy churchgoer, and pulled her lips into a glossy smile.
‘Hello, Dora. I’m Harriet McGuire. May I come in?’
‘Um . . .’
‘I am from the church. I have heard about your troubles, and perhaps I can help.’
Bea wriggled in Dora’s arms. Dora stepped aside, not knowing quite what else to do, and let Harriet pass, in a waft of sepulchral perfume. Harriet gave a little exclamation of disappointment as she settled herself in a chair by the window. ‘I used to visit my parents’ friends here, long ago, when it was a whole house.’ ‘Oh, yes?’
‘They’ve cut this room in half, haven’t they? Oh, it’s a disaster for the light, isn’t it? We used to push the furniture back against the walls for dancing.’ She hauled herself back to the compromised present. ‘They are so heavy-handed when they divide the houses, aren’t they?’
‘We like it . . .’ Dora said feebly. Her euphoric feeling of being RJ was shrivelling away as the old lady spoke.
Harriet’s knobbly hands clasped in her lap. ‘Now, I hear that there is a problem between the Divines and you. I thought that I might be able to help.’
‘Help with what?’
‘Why don’t you tell me what the problem is? Then we can see.’ ‘There isn’t a problem.’
‘Mo says there is. She has been crying at the church every Sunday. She says you’re the neighbours from Hell.’
‘I don’t know why she would say that. They have a lot of visitors and block our drive, but . . . it’s not something we can’t sort out ourselves.’
‘Well, that’s it, you see. I don’t think you realise how things are done here. Mo and Terrence, well, they are—’
‘Good people?’
Harriet gave Dora the same look all these women gave her – health visitors, midwives, neighbours – the look she might give the ghastly daughter-in-law, the sort of young woman who must be dealt with, have deference drummed in somehow.
‘What I was going to say was . . . they are a good churchgoing couple who do good things for the community. All they want is a peaceful retirement.’ She glanced out of the window. ‘I gather you had a party last night.’
‘No. My friends . . .’ Dora’s fuzzy brain finally made the con- nection. Harriet McGuire was not a disinterested observer. She was here to advocate on behalf of Mo and Terrence.
‘You know, Helensburgh really isn’t the kind of place where we disturb others with wild parties. And you having a wee one, as well.’
At this, Bea gurgled engagingly. ‘Although, I suppose, when a house as lovely as this is divided, then a whole other sort of person is attracted to being here.’ Harriet sighed and turned once again to the window. ‘You can never escape the element.’
‘I didn’t have a wild party,’ said Dora, bewildered.
Oblivious to Dora, Harriet continued: ‘There used to be croquet, out on the lawn. I loved it so. I have such happy memories of those times. So terrible that it is a site of conflict now.’
‘Well, there is no conflict from us,’ Dora said, getting to her feet. ‘Mo and Terrence keep trespassing on our garden and play Chris- tian pop songs at full volume. They fill the drive with cars and the house with strangers. I have a baby, as you can see. I am too busy for conflict and so I let most of this ride. You might . . . feed that back? To your friends? That I am too busy for this sort of thing?’
‘I came to help,’ Harriet said. She was clearly unaccustomed to leaving before she was ready, but reluctantly she stood.
Trembling with anger, Dora let the woman pass, observing her angular figure, her shiny shoes and woolly stockings as she left the house without another word. Harriet paused every now and then to survey the garden, and, at the gate, gazed back at the house. Dora had the painful feeling of something being stripped away from her. It was RJ, of course. RJ was gone now.
Mo and Terrence held a loud and blurry discussion above Dora’s head.
Exhausted, she travelled back to the sofa with her baby and turned up the volume on the TV. The only feeling she permitted herself was the tiny spark of gladness that her friends had not seen this. They had been and gone without witnessing her complete shame, the death of who she used to be, right before their eyes.
Chapter fifteen
Wystan
Cecil didn’t mention the rain. Out come the buckets in the corridor and metallic thuds punctuate the classes. A broken gutter outside his window chucks water on to the sill. Wystan lies on his bed, smoking and listening to the pattering, like the tachycardia heartbeat of a failing industrial machine. Outside is grey, even the rhododendrons seem a peculiar shade of grey.
This morning, the author copies of his book arrived. There lies the package, torn open in his excitement, and there is a stack of them, signed and waiting to go out to his friends. Later, he will take one to Mrs Perkins, who he knows will appreciate it. Perkins himself won’t care a shit about it. On his lap, as he smokes, is a copy. He has held it all night there, occasionally waking to admire its dusky-blue cover and the simple Poems by W. H. Auden of the title.
Holding the book after all the waiting is so perfect a feeling that it almost breaks his sense that he ought to be somewhere else when this happened. Like where? In Berlin, reading extracts to Erich? The silence of this place, and the pounding, terrible rain are a strange reception for such a slim, delicate thing.
He gets up, ash falling all over the bedspread. The air tastes stale and damp, and through the leaky windows he can smell the garden’s leaf mould. In the bowels of the house, the boys clatter and yell to the latrine, interrupted by occasional shouts from Jessop. But for the modest pile of blue books, this day has begun like every other.
His excitement is clouded by the troubling events of last night. He was woken by Jamie Taylor’s sobbing, audible through the floor. It is not every night; it does not happen, for instance, on the nights when Wystan is on duty. Jamie Taylor cried at night, inconsolably, at least twice a week all through the summer term, and has started up again in the new term. School does this to a boy, Wystan knows, but for it to continue unabated like this? Wystan has shepherded the boy to Mrs Perkins on a number of occa- sions, but she cannot get much out of him. Unlike the rest of the boys, he appears to have lost weight over the summer rather than gaining it.
Last night, Wystan could bear it no longer. Jessop was obviously going to do nothing about it, though he was on boarder duty. Like Wystan, Jessop had a room in the house within easy reach of the dormitory should there be any problem, though his room was on the ground floor, on the other side of Larchfield. The master on duty was supposed to check on the boys during the night and to listen out for any crisis. There was never any sign of Jessop. Where, in fact, was he on these nights when he was supposed to be looking after the boarders?
When the crying started, Wystan turned on his lamp and con- sulted his watch. It was 2 a.m. He pulled on his dressing gown, lit a candle and felt his way blearily down the stairs. As he approached the door of the dormitory where Taylor slept, it opened and Jessop emerged, face intent and shadowy. He gave a visible jump as he saw Wystan before him.
‘Jessop!’ Wystan exclaimed. If his colleague was there, why was the crying continuing? ‘Taylor’s crying . . .’ he said.
‘What is it to you?’
‘He’s right underneath my room.’
‘Hopeless baby.’ Jessop moved to push past Wystan, but Wystan put out his arm.
‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t cry when I’m on duty. It’s only when you are.’
The two men glared at each other over the candle flame. And, in that moment, Wystan was transported back to similar stumbling moments of discovery in his school days: prefects inexplicably emerging from dorms at strange times; his old cricket master sidling into the small dorm he shared with three other boys and sitting on the bed of the boy he had picked out from the first day, his hands doing something under the covers until the boy cried quietly. They all knew that it was something that must not be spoken of, that was a mark of specialness little boys both craved and feared, and at any rate endured – and he saw the same expression in Jessop’s face, the horrible shiftiness.
‘I’m going to bed,’ Jessop said.
‘Jessop, why does Taylor cry every night you’re on duty?’ ‘He’s a crybaby. I tried to get him to snap out of it, but he’s a hopeless case. Now, Wystan, dear –’ he leant into Wystan’s face – ‘let me pass.’
‘I hope this isn’t what I think it is—’
‘And what is it, then, clever boy?’ Jessop leant in so close Wystan could feel his hot, stale breath on his face. ‘I know what you’re up to, more’s the point. What goes with your fancy friends down south won’t be put up with here, do you understand? Don’t think I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know anything about me.’ Wystan was both angry and frightened now.
‘I know enough to know you need to stop insinuating things about me and let me go to bed!’ And with that Jessop pushed past him and disappeared to his room below.
Wystan suspected that every ear was straining to catch what was being said. Furious, he climbed the stairs back to his room, and lay, unable to sleep. What should he do? Could he, in fact, do anything at all?
Wystan cast his mind back to his own schooldays and how he had managed to deflect the hostility and bullying that was meted out to boys less strange than he was. He did not radiate whatever it was that attracted bullying. He had become proficient at practical jokes which made even the thickest aggressor laugh – was that what had protected him? He did not fully understand why Jessop disliked him so. But now . . . the feeling was mutual. It sat very uncomfortably with Wystan to have a strong negative feeling about anyone. He prized his detachment; his detachment allowed him to work under any circumstances, favourable or not.
With these thoughts churning in his mind, the night passed, and the new day brought sunlight, a bright space between him and the night’s events. It also brought Wystan’s books. Olive had carried them in and lingered a little, eager to see what was in the package for Mr Auden.
Now, there is no time left to rejoice in the books because he is late for his class. He dashes along to his classroom and picks up where they left off discussing a Hardy poem yesterday.
‘To recap: what is the only legitimate subject for poetry?’ ‘Love, sir,’ says McLeod.
‘Correct. And what has this poem taught us is the most important aspect of poetry?’
‘Beat, sir?’ says Theakston, the spindly little blond with the talent for rugby.
‘Yes, and we call that meter. What do we call it, boys?’
‘Meter, sir.’
‘A poem should be spoken aloud.’
‘Sir?’ McLeod raises his hand.
‘Yes, McLeod.’
‘Is it true you write poems, sir?’
‘It is.’
‘Will you read us one, sir?’ The request sounds genuine, but is, of course, accompanied by the smirk that is stuck to every boy over ten. There are a few minutes left. There is nothing further to say about ‘The Darkling Thrush’; the boys are fidgeting. Wystan replies by reciting immediately, in a voice much stronger and clearer than his normal speaking voice, one of his favourite passages in his new book:
‘Will you turn a deaf ear
To what they said on the shore,
Interrogate their poises
In their rich houses;
Of stork-legged heaven-reachers
Of the compulsory touchers
The sensitive amusers
And masked amazers—?’
The bell erupts into the silent room. The boys freeze, half out of their chairs, and stare at him.
Wystan smiles indulgently. ‘Yes, off you go.’ And, in a great muddle of noise and colour, the boys head for the next lesson. Wystan watches them leave, and thinks he may weep at their great friendly mass, pushing and shouting. They do not look back at him. He is forgotten as surely as breakfast.
‘McLeod!’
The boy pauses and turns back.
‘If you don’t all start behaving in class, I’m going to cut my prick off.’
McLeod stares, as do his two friends who have turned at the sound of obscenity.
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘You know what I mean.’ Wystan appears absolutely serious. McLeod sniffs and wipes his nose, at a loss as to what to say.
‘Don’t do that, sir,’ he says.
‘Reluctantly, of course. I would rather you paid attention.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Off you go.’
They leave, this time, in complete silence, until they are out of the door, when there is an almighty outburst of whispering and disbelieving laughter. He has got their attention, anyway. Wystan sighs. His genius for practical jokes is wasted here.
At lunchtime, he returns to his room and sits again with the dusty- blue cover on his knee. He examines the text once more, wincing at the cracks in the punctuation, at the way the poems in print seem angrier, more like his mother speaking than anything original. In the letter that came with the books, Eliot tells him to send the address of any shops in Helensburgh that would like to stock the book. He says again that he is very proud to be publishing this book, that the work is singular and full of promise, even as it seems, at times, wilfully obscure. Wystan feels like a boy again, holding some treasured gift. His gangly legs are half hauled on the bed; he is utterly unconscious of how he looks or what he is, except that somehow he has produced this beautiful thing. He presses it briefly to his chest, knows that to do so is silly, flicks through the pages again.
That no one is there to share it with him cuts deep. This afternoon he has a couple of hours off and he decides to post copies to Cecil and Isherwood and Spender. He will put some in the bookshop and maybe the tourist office will care to have a copy. This will connect him with the world that knows him, that, through this sheet of rain, seems so far away. The boy at the station slips into his mind again. He shifts uncomfortably on the bed; will this wound never heal?
There is a telephone at the school. No one has rung it to congratulate him, but he supposes they might. Mrs Clyde guards it rather jealously, interrogates anyone who uses it, explaining how costly it is to place and take calls. ‘This telephone,’ she says darkly, ‘will be the ruin of this place.’
Wystan takes a piece of paper and writes in his spidery hand:
I am a young man, with light brown hair and a book of poems. Telephone Helensburgh 120 and ask for Wystan.
What should he do with the note? There is no one to post it to. He remembered, as a boy, once writing to his father, who was far away in Egypt, and he simply wrote, Hello, Dr Auden, this is your son, Wystan. I hope you are well. We had toad-in-the-hole for dinner at school. And he told no one, and simply put the envelope in the postbox on the way to church in the village, with his father’s name on and Egypt. The postman emptying the box brought it back to the school, guessing a lonely boy had sent it, and Wystan had to suffer the humiliation of a summons to the head and an explanation of both the school postal system and the ills of excessive sentiment in wartime.
After lunch is a dead-end French class, for which he has not properly prepared. Unnerved by the boys’ expectant faces, he takes a penny from his pocket and a stamp from his wallet and, with the flamboyance of a magician, he instructs the boys to watch.
‘What’s important here is a steady hand, and a confident flick. What’s important, Douglas?’
‘Steady hand, sir. Confident flick.’
‘Excellent. And we lick the stamp so –’ he sticks his tongue out ostentatiously to lick the stamp – ‘then we lay it carefully upon the penny, like so. And we do not breathe, boys. It is imperative we do not breathe – for, if we do, the stamp will flutter away like a butterfly upon the breeze, taking our dreams with it.’
The boys are transfixed. What in God’s name is he doing? Wystan has balanced the penny upon his thumb, with the stamp upon it, slightly arched, ready to waft away at the slightest breath. ‘Do not sneeze, boys. Hold your breath!’ Wystan gives an authoritative flick with his thumb; the penny sails up to the ceiling at rocket speed, hits the ceiling and clatters to the floor.
The boys’ gaze drifts around the room, trying to see what has happened, then Davies squeaks, ‘It’s stuck to the ceiling, sir.’
‘Indeed it is. Would anyone like to have a try?’
Enthralled, the boys take the pennies and stamps he hands out to them and chaos ensues as they jostle to find a good spot. ‘Remember – don’t breathe. And steady hand, confident flick!’ Wystan patrols them as if they are practising declensions, or writing about the Revolution, for sticking stamps to the ceiling is not easy. It is, however, great fun.
Wystan tries not to stare at Jamie Taylor, whose white face barely raises from his desk. He goes through the motions of attaching stamp to penny, but there is no confidence whatsoever in his flick. Wystan stands over him and tries to demonstrate, but the boy simply freezes. At last, the bell rings, and, as the boys pour out, Wystan calls Jamie back. A look, quite simply, of terror crosses the boy’s face. He will not move from the door.
‘Taylor, dear. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Come closer; I want to say something to you.’
The boy shuffles forward.
‘I know,’ says Wystan.
‘Know what, sir?’ the boy mumbles.
‘I want you to know it is going to stop.’
‘Don’t know what you mean, sir.’ The boy shuffles from foot to foot, but a small eye briefly meets Wystan’s.
‘Of course you don’t. Just hear my words.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Jamie Taylor waits for the command to go, his lip trembling.
‘Now, off you go. And don’t worry.’
A short while later, Wystan is leaving the school with his books well wrapped in his leather satchel when he sees on the step a newly cleaned milk bottle, and he picks it up and puts it in his bag. Why?
I don’t know.
You don’t have to know why you do everything.
How he misses Isherwood. How he misses even Sheilagh, not that he will be sending her a copy, as his poems apparently gave her the irrefutable evidence she didn’t want of the weakness of his character. It’s still raining, but now it’s the thin drizzle that Scotland specialises in, where the air itself seems to be composed of droplets of water. He pulls his cap down and sets off into the wet streets. When he comes home, striding up the shining hill, he will have sent his book to his friends and bought a steak to complete the practical joke he alluded to this morning. He will have a lightness in his step because the note will have found its way into the bottle, and he will have sent his loneliness off into the sea. And, that night, Jamie Taylor won’t cry.
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Polly x
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