for this reason that he had so little sense of order in time.
In this first period of hesitation, this question of where to begin, a variety of images presented themselves like glowing balloons that he could reach out for as he chose; and presently he chose one that contained the shape and the colours of his first own room.
For it was himself as a child that he could remember best, or best recall: there was no difficulty in that backward jump of twenty years or more, nothing alien in that small body and more rounded face. He had been a commonplace and stupid little boy, but in many ways he was a better person then and certainly a more agreeable one to himself than he had ever been since. In spite of his somewhat thievish and mendacious disposition he had, like most other children, a very delicate sense of honour; and in those days he had a great deal of affection in his heart, affection for the asking. His emotions were brilliant, wholehearted and direct: and unless he had some positive cause for sorrow, he was happy most of the time. It is true that punishment often came between him and happiness; yet not all punishment succeeded – far from it, for most of it, after the traditional beating, was imprisonment: ‘Richard, go to your room.’ He had an excellent temperament for that mild confinement, a solitary, idle and unfretting mind; and there was never a pleasanter place of apprenticeship than this room in Plimpton rectory.
There were thirty-nine bands of lyres and roses on the wall that ran from the door to the window. You could imagine them as the conventional bars of a gaol or the magnified wires of a bird-cage: they could also be seen as an abacus and a calendar. They were strips that his mother had pasted over the old, unsatisfactory blue-grey background for his birthday; the old background had frustrated him for as long as he could remember, with its foolish pattern of vague trellises that did not meet at the joints, and thus became doubly meaningless; but the strips had changed all this. Lyres and roses, and the roses were a lovely roughened crimson. The roses and the yellow lyres, which were entwined with the roses’ leaves, formed a continuous pattern of whorls, now this way and now that; and yet as well as the pattern each rose and each stringed lyre was a thing in itself. In the first band there were forty-eight roses and forty-seven lyres: this treacherous difference put the calculation of the whole number beyond his powers, for although he delighted in a certain superstitious or perhaps numinous aspect of number he was useless with sums, and in this case he was reduced to counting, one by one. Not that this was any hardship: he spent hours and happy hours in plodding up and down the rows. These were often hours of imprisonment, when he was supposed to be deprived of the pleasure of running about and playing in the open. They did not seem to know that he never ran about voluntarily, at least not when he was alone, as he always was in the holidays; nor that he was utterly indifferent to the countryside – he could not tell a blackbird from a rook, and did not care. In intervals of drawing he was happiest (when he was at liberty) in mooning vaguely, counting his slow, lethargic steps in the disused stable-yard, carefully walking on the cracks, or staring for a pattern or a face in the crazed roughcast of the wall. So although a kind of sharpness rare in him had early warned him to feign reluctance to ‘go up to your room’, he had in fact often been charmed to renew the spell of slow, timeless incantation by counting. It was a room that faced the west, and often his mild vacancy was illuminated by the golden warmth of the declining sun: the wallpaper, the room and that splendid light were intimately linked in his mind – it was the recollection of delight.
And yet it was not always so delightful. He remembered a cold grey morning there: but before he let his recollection go to reinhabit that time and place he made an effort to find out its date. It must have been a Monday, and the first Monday of the holidays. Probably the Easter holidays of his last year at his preparatory school. Certainly it must have been at the beginning of the holidays, because there was the misery of the school report in its long envelope hanging over him; and it must have been a Monday, for there had been no punishment, no recrimination the day before. School had broken up at the end of the week, and he could remember the extraordinarily enhanced feeling of liberty when he came home and found that his father was away, and that he would have his mother to himself until Sunday, a closed season. But Sunday attitudes could never last, and on Monday morning he was told to go up to his room. ‘Richard, go up to your room.’
It would be a wretched report, he knew; but he was only nineteenth in twenty-three, which was an improvement, and if they reproached him with smashing the wash-stand he could point to his drawing prize. But he felt nervous and cold; he wished it all over. He began to count off the days of the holiday, starting from the rose that marked the present date. The progression of weeks ran up and up, and on a Wednesday just before the beginning of the term they ran under a picture, to emerge on Thursday week. This picture was a little water-colour of Colpoys rectory, where his mother had been born; he had never been there, but he knew it exceedingly well from his mother’s descriptions of her life there, and he could go confidently through the door under the Regency porch and know that if he went along the hall to the left of the stairs he would come to a door that led into a walled garden with a peacock in it. He was standing on an immense stretch of lawn running his finger down the iridescent sheen of the kind peacock’s throat when the sound of a door opening below made him jerk. His father was still talking backwards into the room, ‘…, it is no use arguing, Laura. We must have it out in the open.’ And then, loudly, up the stairs, ‘Richard.’
He hurried down, his face composed in an expression of dutiful worry, and stood lumpishly in the accepted place, on the edge of the black hairy rug. It was a brown room, yet cold, and the two north-facing windows on his left, with their lower panes covered with translucent paper lozenges, gave on to a scraped grass-plot. One was further obscured by a monkey-puzzle tree made of blue-black metal, but in the light of it his mother was sitting in a wicker chair, pretending to sew: she did not catch his eye.
His father enjoyed the due procedure of these court scenes, and it would be some time before the indictment began. Richard felt uneasy and low; but it was a situation that he could cope with – he did not feel desperate.
But then Mr Temple said, ‘Have you seen this before, Richard?’ and the bottom of his world fell out.
It was a pound note, with the houses of parliament on one side and the grave, bearded king on the other. He had taken it so long ago that he had forgotten it entirely, but in that moment the thrill and terror came back to him, and the impossibility of returning it to the Melanesian box, and the hiding-place under the board.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Richard, dear,’ said his mother anxiously; but she had joined the enemy and he had nothing to say to her – would not look in her direction.
The anger was battering around his bowed pale sullen head. It went on and on, booming, growing hotter in the face of dumb opposition, stupid opposition (he was too overwhelmed for any intelligent defence even if it had been possible), refusal to negotiate. He heard the creak of the wicker chair and his mother went quickly out of the room.
In his own place again he passed down through the stages until he reached the point where the reality of his sobs had gone, and although his face was still the face of a child crying, mouth open, eyes screwed up and breath checking in his throat and stomach, there were no more tears and in fact as he leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window he had already begun talking to himself, although it was in a low, discouraged way.
Downstairs they were quarrelling: not that he could hear any words, but he was quite certain of it. It is impossible to say how he knew. It was certainly not through listening behind doors, for his mother had let him know that eavesdropping was dishonourable and he would have gone to great lengths to avoid it; but he knew it as completely as he knew that his parents did not like one another and that their united front was a kind of pious, necessary fiction, and that she was really on his side against a common enemy. He had gained none of this knowledge directly from her: he had only seen her once or twice, walking up and down behind the house alone after a disagreement, with her mouth compressed into a hard line and the look of an utter stranger on her
