Episode Seven

PREVIOUSLY IN LARCHFIELD: Dora gives Kit an ultimatum, and a mysterious new addition to the family appears on the doorstep. In 1930 Wystan tries and fails to work in the sun of his room and visits the local kirk where he lights a candle in memory of Uncle Henry, the man he considers his ‘true ancestor’.

To return to Episode Six, click here:

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EPISODE SEVEN: In which Dora escapes a threatening incident at baby group and takes a risk on a magical discovery. In 1930, Wystan’s practical joke reaches its shocking conclusion. and evolves into a life-lesson for the boys. Snake’ by DH Lawrence weaves a link between Dora’s story and Wystan’s.

Chapter eighteen

Dora

‘He’s a Virgil, don’t you think?’ pronounced Dora of the dog, who was sitting in a shaft of weak sunlight, immaculately positioned and wise-looking. They had expected someone to come and claim him, but no one had, and they had gone on with no name for too long. ‘He lives with us in Paradise . . . and I think he knows something.’ The dog was slender and agitated, unfamiliar with open spaces, frightened also of the shadows in the large rooms.

Kit nodded thoughtfully. His suggestion had been Ben, for no reason other than his father had had a black dog called Ben, but Virgil was better. And so the dog got his name. Virgil appended himself quickly to Kit, following him everywhere, and this was an excellent survival tactic, for Kit adored him. When the dog revealed his ten- dency towards hysterical barking at the postman, his unstoppable jumping up at anyone who visited and his foaming terror of any other dog, Kit was already attached to his new companion and forgave him.

Dora was less sure. The dog was not very friendly, and he could, should he turn, devour Beatrice in two gulps. But there was something about him that she recognised, that prevented her from insisting he go. He too was sensitive to what could not be seen, things just on the edge of hearing. He froze when the music upstairs came on, and the banging of feet on the ceiling made him trot up and down the sitting room, nose in the air like a dressage horse, whining, trying to taste or see or smell whatever the invisible disturbance was.

That January day was the inauguration of Barak Obama. Dora had looked forward all day to watching it on the television. Towards evening, she settled herself into her usual place on the sofa, with the baby in her arms, and Beatrice slurped lazily on her bottle while they listened to Obama’s speech. Outside, it was glittering dark and cold, but inside it was bright and excited, as if this small family on the Scottish west coast were part of the global audience. Obama’s breath crystallised as he spoke.

‘Do you think anyone else in Helensburgh is watching this?’ Dora asked her husband. Kit was trying again to light a fire in the vast fireplace, unable to accept that it would not draw. He opened the windows to increase the airflow and held some newspaper over the space. He sighed as smoke wafted into the room and the flames refused to grow.

‘I know, I know!’ he said irritably as Dora glared at him. He retrieved the electric fire and placed it on the hearth, and closed the windows. The dog, who had been shivering by the door, immediately came and slumped in front of the two bars, and Dora’s shoulders visibly relaxed.

‘Come and sit down,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Her husband passed her a glass of wine and rested a hand on her shoulder, and her fingers crept up to link with his. At last, she and Kit were part of a wider world where events of significance happened. Neither the footsteps above, nor the cold at the edge of everything could detract from the sense that they were connected, however briefly, to a hopeful, exciting reality that wanted to include them.

Dora sipped her wine and closed her eyes to the lines of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, read into the frosted air:

. . . Some live by love thy neighbour as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

. . . In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Her fingers crept around the baby’s pudgy hand, as if never to let go, and Dora gazed into her eyes. Their lash-framed blue depths seemed full of contentment. How could Bea trust so, when there was so much danger in the world? Especially their tiny corner of it?

A voice spoke clearly in Dora’s head as she stroked her baby’s cheek. It was her own voice – or was it?

It said, I can win this.

Dora shook her head, but it came again.

I can win this.

The clarity of the words was confusing, as if they were from outside herself. Dora glanced round, in case Kit had said something.

Again the words came – clear, unmistakeable – confirming, if confirmation were needed, that Dora was strange and possessed by wrong feelings. What kind of mother has voices outside her control in her head?

‘Win what?’ Dora whispered to herself. She pressed the side of her head, as if to knock the words out of it. She didn’t want a voice in her head, certainly not one that spoke like this.

‘What did you say, love?’ Kit asked. On the television, the crowd was singing the US anthem, the words fogging the air.

To hear voices was crazy.

She knew she wasn’t crazy.

The baby was happy and safe.

Nevertheless, Dora passed Beatrice to Kit, who planted a huge kiss on the baby’s cheek and held her up above his head; she mouthed and murmured in response. He smiled over at Dora. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Nothing . . . It just makes me happy to see you like that.’

‘I am happy,’ said Kit. ‘This is all I’ve ever wanted.’

Perhaps that was her moment to speak, to connect with her husband and bring him back from being a stranger. Joy from the outside world was brimming in their draughty room. The three of them were a cosy, close unit. Perhaps, indeed, this is what the voice meant? Could she win out over the forces against her?

She need only forgive her husband. She need only make a kindly enquiry, as a good friend might, something to open up a dialogue. Your first wife, she might say, your dead wife . . . I know you miss her. It’s okay. I understand. I’m lonely too.

But she could no more do this than she could banish the voice that rose again in her head.

It’s over.

‘No!’ Dora clapped a hand over her mouth.

‘What’s the matter?’ Kit asked.

Shaking her head, Dora got up. ‘It’s time for her bath now.’ She held out her arms and Kit handed the baby over, puzzled. Saying nothing more, Dora carried Beatrice into the Baltic freeze of the hall and through to the huge Victorian bath, big as a swimming pool for the little girl. Soon the room was full of steam. Dora pulled off her own clothes and she and Bea slipped into the gorgeously warm water together. Now, the only voices were Dora’s and her baby’s. Bea sneezed and gurgled and slapped her tiny hands against the surface, and Dora murmured the lines that came into her head, some lines from Lawrence that she had been reading lately:

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more,
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth . . .

The words took on the rhythm of a prayer.

Even if Dora feared that something had changed, that she had missed some crucial opportunity to speak, it didn’t matter now. Mother and baby were together as they should be, inseparable in the warm amnion of the bath.

Kit left for work the next morning, as briskly and routinely as ever. He and Dora were two arms of a machine that whirred on and on. Dora prepared to take Beatrice to the baby group in the church hall. No one talked to her at the group, but nevertheless she plodded along every week because going to baby group is what you do when you’re new to a place and you have a baby.

Dora gently brushed Bea’s hair, now a downy auburn, and dressed her in her warmest clothes. She slotted her into the pram and they careened and jolted down the drive towards the narrow pavement. Deep in the house, Virgil yapped his despair at being left.

As she passed along the front of the house, Dora felt the familiar prickling at her neck that denoted Mo’s staring presence at the upper window.

Every instinct told her to press on, not to look. No good would come of it. But Dora, that day, could not resist. She wanted to break the deadlock somehow . . . prove its non-existence, even . . . for little Bea. And so, she stopped the pram and looked up.

Dora was stuck to the spot with awe; she had never before looked upon a face so . . . naked in its hate. There was no softening of Mo’s expression as her gaze drifted to Beatrice wriggling beneath the straps. The child fell outside Mo’s sentimental grouping of ‘God’s children’. She began to mouth something at Dora, but then Terrence appeared beside her and gently turned her away.

Dora pushed on, her hands and legs shaking. How could she ever explain this to Kit? It made no sense.

At the church hall, the smell of sweaty toys, dust and yoga mats gushed over her. Children’s voices combined to create the sense of stepping into a brightly coloured circle of hell. Flabby, exhausted mothers lined the walls, as if at a superannuated school dance. Tower- ing in the middle of a clump of baby-group organisers by the subs table was an unexpected sight: a man. He had highlighted hair, stylish glasses and a small baby strapped to his chest. All the women had their faces turned up to him, listening to an anecdote he was telling in a low voice, then the group broke into laughter. Dora knew who he was immediately. The unexpected handsomeness, the popularity: it could only be Theodore, with the fabled grandchild. He caught her eye and did not smile.

Dora wrestled the pushchair through the door, then stood help- lessly for a moment. She propelled herself to the table, dropped her subs into the jar. ‘Morning!’ she said brightly, expecting and receiving no reply, then she lifted Beatrice out of the pram and carried her off to find something for them to play with.

She knew that coming to the group did no good at all, but its unpleasantness that day felt right, like a penance for the voice that had spoken yesterday.

I can win this, indeed.

Dora settled on a mat with her baby. She wished only to be invis- ible and simply rest amongst the muffled echoes of the children’s voices, much as she used to enjoy writing in a café, amongst life but not part of it. But she wasn’t the lucky sort, the sort who gets to be invisible when she wants to be. In due course, a pair of immense trainers appeared beside her and she looked up into the hard and disconcertingly lovely face of Theodore.

‘You upset my mother this morning,’ growled the man. He had clearly rehearsed this intervention, and was convinced of its rightness.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘She’s rung me up crying. What did you do to her?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘My mother’s a good person. You should remember that.’

‘Your mother,’ said Dora, struggling to her feet, ‘is a nasty bitch.’

Theodore’s eyes widened behind the expensive frames. He took a step closer.

Shit! The words had come out. Dora had meant only to think them, and there they were, out in the world. She put her hand over her mouth again. What was happening? Words were flying unbidden into her head, and flying out of her mouth.

Women now surrounded them, arms folded, eyes gleaming. Dora pressed her lips together to prevent her pronouncing them all a coven of stupid evil witches.

‘This one just called my mother a bitch!’ said Theodore. He leant over so close that his baby’s woolly hat almost brushed Dora’s lips.

‘I did not!’ said Dora. She scooped Beatrice up and held her to her breast. ‘My baby isn’t safe here. We’re leaving.’

The mothers lining the walls raised their drooping heads like desiccated flowers suddenly given a drink. Dora hauled herself across the room, just a step ahead of the silence cresting behind her. She strapped Beatrice back in and headed out. The baby writhed and mewed.

What the hell just happened? Dora bumped roughly along the pavement, going – where? She could not face the long walk up the drive, with Mo glaring at her all the way. Every window she passed seemed to stare out at her now. Should she ring Kit? And say what? That she had inadvertently called Mo a bitch to her son? Kit’s patience was wearing thin. And now came the voice that had spoken last night.

It’s over.

There was no one to ring and no escape.

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid . . .

Down to the shore. Where else? The sea sparkled in the stark cold.

Bea protested gently at being hauled out of the pram again, then she snuggled in Dora’s arms. Dora paused at the top of the bank that led to the little cove near Paradise, dumbstruck at the sight of the ocean and the islands beyond, picked out today in purple and gold. She had found, since arriving in Helensburgh, that she had an eye for sea glass, would see it glinting from far away. She clambered down the bank and scanned the jumble of the shingle.

They were alone on the beach, and, being some way below the road, almost invisible. When Dora found a piece of glass, she showed it to Beatrice, touching its smooth shine against her cheek. She wished she could get the pram down as well, so that no one would know she was here at all. Invisibility was what she craved, or just to be somewhere else, viewed with different eyes.

Then she saw, a little way ahead, a flicker of light. A big piece of sea glass? This was always the quest, to find a large smooth piece of the rarest kind: blue. Dora cooed to her daughter and hurried across the stones to see what it was.

It was a bottle, glinting through its grime. It was still wet, seem- ingly just deposited carefully by the fingers of the sea. Disappointed, Dora began to turn away, but something made her pause and look at it again.

She pulled away a strand of obscuring seaweed. Inside the bottle was a twisted piece of paper.

‘Beatrice! It’s a message in a bottle!’

The cork was stuck fast; easing it out was impossible. Shielding Bea’s face against her chest, Dora smacked the top of the bottle on the nearest boulder. It broke immediately, leaving a raw, jagged neck. At her feet was a twig, and she dipped it into the bottle neck, pulling out the neat scroll of paper.

It was unbearably exciting. Dora remembered, as a child, setting free a helium balloon with a card wrapped in plastic on the end of the string, on which was carefully written her name and address. A girl wrote back, some time later, from Yorkshire. She had been riding by a hedge on her pony when she saw the balloon, and she was keen on a correspondence. The two wrote for a while, but the girl in Yorkshire lived a life very different from Dora’s, and they received no encouragement from either family to move the friendship from the page to anything more. After an exchange or two, it fizzled out. But it left Dora always with a hunger for pen pals, for the sheer adventure of communication in unexpected places.

The coil was very neat and tied with string. By now, Dora’s fingers were freezing and it was impossible to undo the knot. She eased the twine along the scroll with her teeth, gagging slightly as the paper touched the inside of her mouth. A fingernail, at the end, lifted it off.

Dora pressed the soft, yellow paper flat on her jeans. The writing was very spidery, but as black as if it had been newly written:

I am a young man, with light brown hair and a book of poems. Telephone Helensburgh 120 and ask for Wystan.

Wystan? Dora turned the paper over in case there was an address. There was nothing.

There was only one Wystan in the whole of recent history, as far as Dora knew.

Of course, it might be another person with the incredibly rare name of Wystan.

But Helensburgh 120? That was a very old number indeed.

Dora took out her phone and dialled the code for Helensburgh, followed by the number 120. While the line hissed and snored, she squeezed Bea excitedly.

It was miraculous to be holding a note from the great poet!

As she shivered with the phone against her cheek – not expecting anything to happen, but thrilled to be ringing someone, anyway – she thought of how much money the note might be worth. Perhaps it would be enough to escape?

But then, of course, it was just a scruffy piece of paper. It could be all made up.

‘Ow!’ There was a searing whistle down the line. Dora jumped back from the phone.

‘This is Helensburgh 120. Mrs Clyde speaking. Who is calling, please?’

‘I’m . . .’ Dora dragged her exploded thoughts back into words. ‘Pardon? Have I connected? I’m . . . Mrs Fielding. I’d like to speak to . . . Wystan?’

‘Mr Auden is teaching at present. Is he expecting you?’

Mr Auden! ‘He . . . left a message asking me to call.’

Surely, at any moment, the sounds in her ear would return to the sounds of the sea, as if, instead of a telephone, she was holding a conch shell. She strained to hear every detail, desperate that it should not end. An irritable sigh. ‘In that case, please come to the school and you can wait for him to finish his class. Thank you!’ The voice faded sharply as the woman made to hang up.

‘Wait!’ Dora’s voice echoed round the little bay.

‘Pardon?’

‘Just . . . Can you tell me what school? I mean, your address?’ ‘Larchfield School. Colquhoun Street. Helensburgh. Goodbye!’ And the voice was gone.

The phone slipped out of Dora’s fingers and clinked on to the glossy pebbles. Bea’s head wobbled on her neck as she pushed against her mother, trying to get free.

Dora had always believed in miracles. They were an essential of existence; sometimes only a miracle made sense. They happened all the time to lucky people. But now . . . the weight of sadness lifted and she spun round and round with Bea. ‘It’s going to be all right!’ she cried to the sea, to her daughter. Magic was just right there, waiting for you to believe in it.

She slid the note into her pocket and clambered back up the bank, one hand still cradling Bea’s woolly-capped head. Bea wriggled and her pie-round face broke into a grin. She sensed something exciting had happened, and was happy. Dora made a smile back and kissed her cheek.

As they approached the front door, Kit emerged, home unexpect- edly for lunch. Dora was dizzy with what had just happened. She composed her face back to its normal impassivity.

She said, ‘I need to go and do a bit of shopping. Can you take Bea for an hour or two?’ She pushed the pram towards her husband. ‘Now? Don’t you want some lunch?’ Kit looked at his wife peculiarly, as he often did.

‘Not hungry, thanks! Do you want anything?’ Dora was already walking past him to the road; already her mind was on the school.

Kit hugged Bea, frowning as he followed his wife down the drive. ‘Just an hour? I need to get back to work.’

She turned, smiled at her daughter and received a kiss on her lips from her husband.

‘No more than two,’ she said, normality personified.

Kit was the sort of person to talk her out of a miracle, and that was not going to happen. It was better to smile and not explain.

Dora’s little family shrank behind her. Her eyes itched. It’s over. What lay ahead was unknown, icy, full of shadows.
There was still time to forget about magic, to turn back up the

drive, have some lunch and try to make the best of things.

I can win this.

But, of course, she went. She’d be mad not to.

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Chapter nineteen

Wystan

Transitus Two: perfect boys at the perfect age. Wystan is helpless before them, these beautiful twelve- and thirteen- year-olds, full of arrogance and insecurity in equal measure. Their voices are not yet broken, but now is when they begin to have the first sense of themselves as men; they glimpse the oncoming possi- bility of power, like a horse cresting a distant hill.

The boys of this age are products of the euphoria after the war, the darling children of reunions after the armistice. They both delight and frighten him, such hope is invested in them. They do not know they embody the attempt to lay unspeakable horror to rest, to send the past away. They crow and strut, sensing their importance, which has nothing to do with who they are. They seem to shine with the future, and yet the future is as uncertain as ever it was.

They pay absolutely no attention and he can hardly blame them. The stuff Perkins told him to teach is as dry as a bone. But still he has to get through at least some of it. After this, some of the boys are going on to the big Scottish schools; others will be packed off to England. There are examinations for them to pass, and, the way things are going, they’re not going to pass them.

Larchfield, as he writes to his friends, is a marvellously awful school. Apart from the ragbag of teachers – of whom he counts himself firmly as the worst – it is truly crumbling round their ears. Hamish, the gardener and handyman, seems to spend most of his time on the roof with nails in his mouth, hammering pieces of tarpaper over the gaps in the slate. Woodworm seems to have invaded every beam that is not damp. Tiny piles of wood-dust line the corridors. Wystan writes to Christopher that he spends most of his own time adjusting the water pressure in the boys’ urinal with a brass turn-key.

The bell goes and footsteps rattle down the hall. The door flings open and the boys come tumbling in, lethargic and hysterical after a lunch of grey stovies doled out by Mrs Clyde. Wystan says nothing, leaning back with a wry smile on his face. A couple of boys glance up as they shift in their seats, opening and closing the desks, arranging books and hiding contraband of different sorts. On the blackboard behind him is written, D. H. Lawrence: the hero and the snake.

‘So,’ says Wystan, getting to his feet and hovering at the front of the class.

McLeod looks up briefly and his expression freezes. He nudges his companion who also stares, the giggle dying in his throat. The class falls silent as Wystan parades slowly up and down. He has a pained, weary expression on his face and is limping slightly. Even-tually, McLeod’s hand goes up.

‘Sir?’

‘Yes, McLeod.’ ‘Sir, did you do it?’

‘Do what, Mcleod?’

The boy’s hand moves through the air to point reluctantly at Wystan’s crotch. Blood is seeping round his fly.

‘Oh, that. No, not quite.’ Wystan lifts a knife from the table, opens his fly and partially pulls out a rolled piece of flesh, which he severs with a cry and holds up.

One of the boys gives a strangled scream.

‘See, boys!’ Wystan gasps. ‘See what you’ve driven me to? I told you I would do it, if you didn’t pay attention!’ Then he falls to the floor, clutching his crotch, the meat dangling feebly in his fingers.

There is a horrified silence. Then McLeod says, ‘He’s pretending.’

Wystan pleads into his trousers, ‘What shall I do? No children! No wife!’

‘Sir, you’re fibbing, aren’t you?’ McLeod comes from behind his desk and stands over his teacher, examining the severed member held aloft. Whereupon Wystan leaps to his feet, zips his fly and stands in a triumphant pose, like a ballet dancer. ‘Now, let us commence today’s lesson, attested to, here, on the board behind me. Theakston, can you read it?’

Their teacher is clearly quite mad. Theakston reluctantly drags his eyes to the board and reads the line on it. When he’s done, he gazes upon the crumpled piece of flesh on the desk.

‘What is that, sir?’

‘That? That, Theakston, is a prime steak. I shall be eating it tonight. Now. I’ve decided it is time for Lawrence. Some heroes are needed in this sorry country of ours, and it is, I’m afraid, down to you lot to step up.’

‘Sir, if there’s another war, you’d be called up.’

‘That, Frazer, is true. But I am not made of the stuff of heroes. I’m the kind of man who’d cut his own prick off for attention, and that’s really not the calibre of officer our great country is seeking.

‘In my view, the stuff I am supposed to teach you will equip you only for another futile war, and for emasculation on a par with my wee joke there.

‘What you need to know is how to integrate the body and the mind. You need to know how to be a man – a real man. You need to understand heroism, to think from your . . . loins. And we are therefore going to study, for the next few lessons, the pinnacle of the male: D. H. Lawrence.’

He has their attention. It is a giddy feeling.

‘McLeod, please read us “Snake”.’ He hands the book to the boy, his eyes fixed on the class as he does so. He is afraid that, if he breaks eye contact, the spell will be broken and they will all start giggling again.

McLeod takes the book and, in his lovely voice, brimming with childishness and yet cracking a little at that very edge of adulthood, reads:

“The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold

are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him

off . . .”

A hush descends on the class, for the boys are listening. What is more, McLeod is listening to his own words, unconscious of reading them aloud.

“Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!”

This is the moment Wystan will remember; at this moment, he becomes, for however long the magic lasts, a teacher. Even if what he is teaching them is not on the curriculum and he is further jeop- ardising their chances of passing the examinations, he is teaching them something important. Or letting them learn it themselves.

‘And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.’

Wystan is so moved by the boy’s solemn speaking of the lines, his innocence reverberating through a story of the loss of innocence, that he cannot, at first, speak. Even though some of the words are beyond the boys’ vocabulary, they have understood the poem, and they have felt its sadness. McLeod closes the book uncertainly and they all look to Wystan for guidance. He may be a young man only just out of childhood himself, with bloodstained trousers and the curling remains of his practical joke on the desk in front of them, but, in this moment, he has earned their respect, and poetry has touched their undeveloped little hearts.

‘Now, isn’t that wonderful, boys?’ Wystan says quietly. ‘And do you see? Do you see how hard it is? To resist the pettiness of the world?’

He will, in later lessons, return to the curriculum; they will trudge through the set texts; he will do his best to liven them up and the boys will pay attention. Wystan has crossed some kind of line drawn in their budding souls. He has reached them, and something has changed. Despite his misgivings about the school system, he does want them to leave this sorry place equipped, in even a small way, for the rigours of public school. The forward momentum of British education cannot be resisted: a relentless fascist machine that will spit them out the other side as soldiers or sexless governors-general and the like. All he can do is plant some small seeds of independent thought into their minds. He is sorry for them, and what is coming: every rottenness and corruption.

But they will remember this Lawrence lesson, and the ones he slips in after: the Wilfred Owen lesson, and the one on Edward Thomas. Somewhere in their hearts they will carry what he has shown them: that there are many ways to be a man, and many ways to be brave.

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FROM ‘Snake’ by DH Lawrence

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. [. . .]
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more,

That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
[. . .]
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

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