boys there, and Richard was lucky to have him as a particular friend; for Richard was not a popular boy. Perhaps no boy is ever much liked unless his values are just the same as those of his contemporaries and unless he has the same sense of tact, which Richard had not. There was a curious piece of iron, for example, that lay on a shelf in the hall; one day Richard took it, because he had always coveted its spiny shape. He showed it to his friends, but after some initial excitement they had hesitated and then they had withdrawn their moral support. Many things could be taken, such as elastic bands and things from the laboratory, but somehow meteorites were not among them and they all knew it, except Richard. There were many things like that that he got just wrong. But his unpopularity, at its worst, was never more than a mild unpopularity, being mitigated by his good looks and his courage: he was far more aggressive than Gay, and it would not do to meddle with him. Most little boys are cowards, and when they fight it is upon the tacit understanding that neither will go too far; but Richard could not be relied upon to keep in bounds.
He and Gay had always got along well together, but it was only in the last year that they had been such close friends, drawn together, it must be admitted, by the abominable vice of sodomy. Gay very much admired Richard’s talent for drawing, and Richard had illustrated most of his books: Richard also made drawings for Gay’s primitive, mediæval jokes – some few of them were clean, but Gay’s mind was very like a sink, and most of them had to circulate under double oaths of secrecy. Not that Gay was exceptional in this; Grafton was a rather dirty school at that time, and it was not particularly Gay’s influence that had turned the top form into a little suburb of Sodom – a cheerful and unselfconscious Sodom, however, for it was an unusually happy school.
It was from Gay, too, that Richard had caught the habit of reading. But it was unfortunate for Richard that Kipling should have been Gay’s favourite author, for Kipling’s curious image of the world was not the most reassuring one for him. To enjoy Kipling you need a strong stomach, a certainty of the Herrenvolk’s existence, and an unshaken conviction that you belong to it.
And Gay had always been a fount of worldly knowledge. Long before this, when they were both little boys in the lowest form, he had been able to give Richard some idea of what was the thing in that particular community: in the kindest way he had said, ‘You don’t want to be a blooming arse with your French, you know, going on like a foreigner. The chaps are laughing at you.’ Laura Temple had been educated at Lausanne; she spoke beautiful French and had taught Richard very early and very well, but even after he had been at school for some time he had still not grasped the atmosphere of the place better than to go on angering Mr Frisby and the rest of the class with this odious perfection.
Richard would never make such a gaffe now – he was too well attuned, at last, to the feelings of the upper school – but Gay remained his authority for nearly all matters outside it. Gay could explain books; Gay could explain dark passages. And yet in this relationship there was no striving for place, no first and second fiddle; it was a singularly sweet mutual liking, and the wearisome domination that is part of so many adult friendships was not there at all. They could speak to one another openly, with an ingenuous lack of dignity that would never come again.
When Gay had helped him move his books they went out to a place beyond the cricket pitches called Starve-Acre, where they had the habit of sitting upon a bank in the evening sun. Richard was carving a lump of chalk into the likeness of the school porter while Gay told him of the events in his holidays, which were always filled with parties, picnics, excursions and so on, because he had a large family and his people lived in a thickly-populated part of the country – and because they were rich. Richard was deeply engrossed with the porter’s ear, but through it he heard Gay’s spirited imitation of his aunt, shrieking in a cross falsetto, ‘… a dreadfully vulgar man in a screaming bookie’s suit.’
‘But wasn’t that Brown’s father?’ asked Richard.
‘Yes. But she didn’t know it at first. Then she did.’
‘She didn’t mean he was really common?’
‘Of course she did. He is, too.’
‘But he’s a colonel.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Can officers be common, Gay?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Gay, with conviction. ‘There are some rotten regiments, who just get the dregs …’
He went on; but Richard, half listening and half reflecting, found that one of the props of his tentative system, that of gentility by office, was giving way. Gay was going on from the Army Service Corps and the like to bodies of his own invention, such as the Brothel Corps, and he was enjoying his own wit to a high degree when Richard interrupted him and said confidentially, ‘But I say, Gay, that’s not the same for parsons, is it?’
‘Oh no,’ said Gay, as earnestly as he could manage, ‘parsons are always all right, I dare say.’
He did not win any scholarship, not even the smallest; the recollection of this time arose cold and dark in his mind – the first adult, whole and irremediable unhappiness. It mingled with that of his father’s death, though this was an emotion that also overflowed into diffuse awe, agitation and excitement, as well as sorrow and dread of the void; and the visual image for both was the same. It was the cross-piece of his window, black against the shining grey of the sky, while the cold twilight filled the room behind him and all comfort drained out of it: he sat there so long on the floor gazing up in that wretched time between the examinations and the results and so long when all his worst suspicions (although they had been exaggerated to take off the curse) became the facts that he was to go to bed with; and in the same way he sat there some weeks later, in the same silent, cold, uncoloured light, during those unending hours when there were strangers in the house and his father was to be buried.
Llewelyn Temple had been kind when the news came. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Richard bâch, but there it is. Perhaps it is all for the best. We must try not to be too disappointed.’ It was the kindest thing he had ever said, and the sudden spurt of tremulous affection that Richard had felt then had not died away in twenty years.
Perhaps it was all for the best: it was certainly not entirely for the worst. At all events it turned out to be nothing like the terrifying fate that he had imagined. Before the new rector came to take his dead father’s place they moved to a cottage within bicycling distance of Easton Colborough, and he went to the local grammar school.
The school at Easton had remained very much what it was when it was founded, some four hundred years before, a place of instruction for the boys of the town and the immediate countryside. Its meagre endowment had tempted no man’s cupidity, and it had neither become a minor public school nor part of the state’s system of education. It was a grammar school: the chief subject was grammar, Latin grammar, and the boys bawled their way through hic haec hoc as their predecessors had always done. The great part of the school was housed in one vast barn-like hall which had three classes in it, three separate classes with three masters and three distinguishable pandemoniums; the noise in this hall seemed to be quite chaotic, but somewhere in the din there would always be a pack of boys going through their hic haec hoc. The cobwebs in the bare rafters had stirred to this noise for centuries, and it was not likely that the school would change its ways now: in all these years it had never turned out a classical scholar of any reputation, but perhaps that had never been its intention – although up to the end of the eighteenth century it still sent a few boys on to the university. It was certainly not its intention now. Its intentions, as far as it was conscious of having any,
