Bilgewater Read online

  Thus I have been no stranger to love, isolated though my life has been. The derangement love seems to cause has actually made me value isolation more as term has followed term.

  And I love the holidays.

  Let me describe how it is with me and father in the school holidays.

  My father is reading in the Fives Court and looks up to see if I am still there. When he sees that I am not, he wanders about in the rockery, then among the greenhouses and lettuce beds to see if I am there, keeping his fingers all the time in the place in the text—he teaches the Classics and reads them all the time for pleasure, too. On the journey he gets deflected once or twice, standing for long stretches of time regarding a caterpillar negotiating a stone, picking a sweet-pea and running a finger up and down its rough, ridgy stalk, walking out to the village shop to buy tobacco but forgetting the tobacco to watch water running down a drain. At most seasons of the year he wears long mufflers curled over into tubes. He has an invalidish look, fragile at the waist, snappable as a sweet-pea and this is for some reason lovable. If he notices anybody as he walks about he smiles at them and they look at him kindly back.

  Sometimes he finds me. If it is summer he most likely finds me in the School pool, swimming up and down. It is one of the most marvellously royal and luxurious things to do—most princess-like—to be legitimately and all alone in a school swimming pool in the school holidays. Up and down, up and down I swim, frog’s face, frog’s body, eyes shut tight, thinking how I would be the envy if they knew it of the whole of my Comprehensive who are all in the town making do with the Public Baths or the freezing sea.

  Up and down, up and down I swim, father standing across on the shore, like Galilee, watching the green water and the black guide lines wriggling like snakes as I pass over them. “There’s a poor beetle,” he calls. “Whisk it out. That’s right. Poor fellow.”

  Up and down the pool I go, spluttering bubbles. Soon my father starts reading again. After a while, still reading he wanders away.

  Once—just once—when I was about thirteen I remember opening my eyes and finding him gone and wondering in a very inconsequential way if my mother had had a rather unexciting life.

  CHAPTER 2

  Throughout the peace there has always of course been Paula and perhaps without Paula such peace would have been intolerable. Perhaps it was intolerable, it occurs to me now. Perhaps that is why my mother upped and died. Perhaps my mother took one look at me and thought, “I’m bored stiff and now this.” I think that it may be Paula who makes desirable the wonderful peacefulness of father, and the great tornado of Paula which makes the still air round father such delight.

  She is thirty-six and comes from Dorset. That in itself is extraordinary for up here. You meet plenty of people in the North-East from Pakistan or Jamaica or Uganda or Zambia or Bootle but scarcely a body from the south coast of England.

  Paula arrived here mysteriously—I don’t think she had thought it all properly out—when she was seventeen as assistant to a real matron who retired hastily leaving Paula to swoop into power. She must have looked and been most improperly young but I would like to see the Headmaster or Board of Governors or representative of any Ministry of Education, Emperor, Principality or Power who could have removed her even at seventeen had she a mind to stay. And not a gestapo, K.G.B. nor any hosts of Midianites I think would ever have wanted Paula to go. Once you’ve met her you need her. The world runs down, the lights go out and everyone starts stumbling in the dark the minute Paula isn’t there.

  She’s lovely, Paula. She has a grand straight back joining on to a long, duchess-like neck and a whoosh of hair scooped into a silky high bundle with a pin. She’s tall, with a fine-drawn narrow figure with sloping shoulders and whatever she wears looks expensive. At father’s school functions she sails in dressed in anything and sits down anywhere and all eyes turn. She nods and smiles, this way and that, and all the pork butchers’ wives in polyester and earrings on the platform look like rows of dropping Christmas trees.

  Paula has a voice like Far from the Madding Crowd—beautiful. “There’s my duck,” “That’s my lover.” To show you the full marvellousness of Paula when she says, “That’s my lover” to any of the boys who’s in her sick room I’ve never heard of one who sniggered.

  Paula’s deep funny burry voice goes with her rosy cheeks and bright eyes and hurtling feet. She is always running and usually towards you. “Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,” always makes me think of Paula, and I told her so the first time she read it to me when I was about eleven. I was a very late reader and it was an effort even at eleven to sit down and read for long so Paula used to read to me. I wish she did so still.

  “Warm south,” says Paula, “Wish I wurr an’ not in this God-forzaken hoale.”

  “Why d’you stay here then?” asks the boy of the day, calling through from the sick room. There is a sick room for solitary sufferers and a San for epidemics. The sick room nearly always has someone or other in it, usually one of the youngest ones. They troop up in droves. “Matron, I’m sick,” “Matron, I’ve got a burst appendix,” “Matron, I’ve punctured a lung,” and she bundles them off whizz, bang, thermometer, pulse—“Rubbish, my lover. Stop it now, do. Sit through on the bed and drink some cocoa and hush whilst I read to our Marigold.” She sorts them out every time, the ones who are sick and the ones just home-sick. They say terrible things sometimes.

  “Matron, I’m bleeding from the ears.”

  “Matron, Terrapin’s committed suicide.”

  “Matron, Boakes is in a coma.”

  If it’s not true, and it hardly ever is—she knows. If it is true she’s like a rushing mighty wind and the local hospital is on its toes in an instant as she hurtles down upon it ahead of the stretcher, orderlies toppling like ten-pins, the plume of hair bouncing masterfully to the very lintel of the operating theatre door. She’s well-known is Paula. When anyone is waiting for exam results it is Paula who prises them out. She’s down at the Post Office at dawn. They expect her now. And when there is any trouble or excitement in a boy’s family she knows the minute it has happened, and sometimes before.

  “Why d’you stay here?” asked the patient of the day after I’d told her she was like the warm South.

  “The dear knows, my lover.”

  “Who’s the dear?” asked the boy. It was probably Terrapin or Boakes. They were forever slurping cocoa the first year or so.

  “Well, not you and that’s for sure.”

  Terrapin (or Boakes) lay comfortably warm within, just out of sight through the sick-room door. I sat on the floor, by Paula’s sitting room fire. Paula sat in the rocking chair, straight upright under her hair, Keats on her knee.

  “Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.”

  The fire blazed up. There was a raw, bleak wind outside and a black branch tap-tapping on the glass, sea-gulls shouting miserably at each other, the sea noisy. On the mantelpiece was a picture of Paula’s family—a farmer on a hay-cart and a lot of little children grinning and squinting against the sun in floppy hats. Somewhere near Lyme Regis apparently, wherever that was. Dorset. Wessex. The warm South.

  “Why d’you stay here, Paula?”

  “Because you’re always askin’ for stories,” Paula said. “I’ve been taken kind-hearted. Seems to me I’m a very nice woman.”

  She went on with the Ode to a Nightingale and Terrapin—I remember now that it was Terrapin—made faces at me of peculiar horror from the sick-room bed, leaning out of it from the knees so he could see me and looking fit as a flea.

  I never felt that Paula found me very important though. Far from it. She never had favourites. There is a great sense of inevocable justice about her and although one had the sensation that her devotions and emotions ran deep and true you never found her ready to discuss them—not the loving emotions anyway.

  Whether it were ridiculous Terrapin,
friendly Boakes or wonderful divine and heavenly Jack Rose, the hero of the school, she treated them all alike. For me she had had from the start a steady unshakeable concern that wrapped me round like a coat. She never fussed me or hung about me and since I was a little baby I don’t remember her ever kissing me or hugging me. Every night of my life she has looked in on me at bedtime to tuck me in, and when I had the measles or the chicken pox I had them over in the Boys’ Side with her and I knew absolutely for certain though I never asked that she would always be within call.

  But she has never tried to mother me. She’s not a soft woman, Paula. She cannot stand slop of any kind and again and again she says—it is her dictum, her law unquestionable—BEWARE OF SELF PITY.

  Yet you can tell her anything. She is never shocked, she is never surprised. She accepts and accepts and accepts. Puffy Coleman keeps falling in love with the very little boys (“Well, it’s not as if he does anything”); dear Uncle Edmund Pen HB climbs ladders and weeps for love of anything vaguely female (“He’s romantic the dear knows”); one of the boys gets howling drunk at The Lobster Inn after failing all his O levels (“He’s to be sobered and pitied and set to do them again at Christmas”). And she never thought that it was in any way odd that I could not read at the age of ten. “If the eyes are right,” she said, “and we have now got them right, the reading will come. I’ve no opinion of these mind-dabblers and I.Q.s and dear knows.” And the reading did come. In the end.

  And Paula never, ever, gives me the impression that I am ugly and once when I said something of the kind she went off like a bomb. “You get no sympathy from me on that score, my lover,” she declared, thumping and clattering about with a sewing-machine.

  “I’ve no friends,” I wailed. (It was after the measles. I was in a bad way.)

  “More fool you.”

  “Everyone hates me.”

  “Don’t be conceited. Oh help me and save me the thing is all busted to bits.”

  “Not surprising when you’ve dropped it on the floor. That was my mother’s sewing-machine,” I said. I remember I took pleasure in saying this. I intoned it. “My father gave it to my mother. She always loved it.”

  “Pity she didn’t use it a bit more then. To think when I came here and you a naked worm wrapped in old bits of blanket and not a gown prepared!”

  “She was unworldly—”

  “Then she’s best off where she is.”

  “Paula!”

  “BEWARE OF SELF PITY,” she thundered, bright-eyed and beautiful, “BEWARE OF—”

  “I’ve no mother. I can’t read. I’m ug—”

  “You can read as well as many. You’re a witch at your figures. You can play difficult piano by ear and you can keep up with your father at his chess. What’s more—”

  “I’m ugly.”

  “You’ve got lovely skin and hands and hair.”

  “Oh Paula, my hair’s terrible. It’s frizzy. It’s fluorescent. It gives you a migraine. It’s the joke of the place.”

  “You wait,” said Paula, solemn as an oracle, sticking the needle of the sewing-machine through her little finger and out the other side and bellowing like a beast, “I’m injured, I’m bleeding, I’m stuck to the needle!”

  Rescued, rocking herself, she added, “You’re the best girl in the world. You’re my best friend in the world.”

  “Well, you’re mine, too, I suppose,” I said and we looked at each other, no nonsense. Then I said, “Actually you’re the only friend, just as I’m yours. We haven’t got any more.”

  “That’s true,” said Paula clutching her hand up into a ball and sitting on it to kill off the pain, “This god-forsaken loanely place.”

  “Well why d’you stay here?”

  Which was where we began.

  Thursdays were always the evenings when these conversations with Paula took place and had done so “from long since” as our Mrs. Things say, because Thursdays were the evenings when father received visitors.

  He had done this since before the war, even before he was married, and the visitors had always been the same: one or two, never more than three Old Masters. Uncle Pen and Puffy Coleman were inevitables and the third was often an amalgam of cobwebs and dust called Old Price. Every term-time Thursday at about seven-thirty these people came roaming round like elderly, homing snails. They unwind garments in the hall when it is not cold, drop walking sticks—Uncle HB has a shooting stick—into the hall-stand and trail dismally into the study. Paula takes them coffee and glasses and father slowly unlocks the shelf-cupboard in the bottom of his desk and brings out a bottle of wine which he never opens until well after they have all arrived and would probably never open at all if he were not kept very firmly at it by Uncle HB who often brings a personal hip-flask, too, though I don’t think father has ever noticed.

  Uncle HB as the minutes after the coffee wear on thumps the hip-flask about and moves it into very conspicuous places because he is a good man and loathes cowardice of all kinds and believes in straightforward honesty where weaknesses are concerned. “I drink,” he says, “but never secretly,” and he glares round the room as if everybody else has a still in the wardrobe. My father doesn’t drink secretly either and I’m sure Puffy doesn’t—only lots of ginger beer with the boys—and if Old Price drank more than two sips he’d go up in a little wisp of smoke. I often wonder how the convention of father providing the wine began and why he is expected to produce a weekly bottle of what Paula calls Rosy when he seems to need so very few of the usual pleasures of life. On his own he would never get any further than the mechanics of gazing at the bottle and peering about under exercise books, old tea pots and the odd sock for the corkscrew and at long last, standing like a priest at Mass gazing at the pinkness of the wine held aloft towards the window or the slinky, chilling sexy face of Primavera over the fireplace. In the end Uncle Pen who never notices the colour or the Botticelli takes the bottle from him, smells it, complains of it and pours it out. Paula then leaves them, taking the tray, and the four of them sit on until about half-past ten.

  Sometimes, when I was little, I was allowed to sit with them for a bit—well, not so much allowed. I just did. They did not seem to notice and I learned much. When I was four or five I would sit for ages under the desk playing with a heap of old shoes my father keeps there. They were friendly shoes with names and I had good long private conversations with them before Paula descended like a valkyrie. “Now excuse me of course and such-like, but she’s ’ere and I’m ’avin’ ’er out. Under that desk. Yes. I’ve looked the school over. Ought to be ’shamed! She’ll be stunted of growth. Five year old and after eight o’clock at night! No don’t disturb yourself Mr. Hastings. Hold on to your flask it’ll topple”—and her arms would come scooping down and gather me up and I’d be flown through the air above all their heads, yelling “I’m not tired. I’m busy. You’re not KIND Paula,” etc., dangling by its laces a shoe which would never see home or family again.

  As I grew older I became too large to fit under the desk and also if I may be forgiven for mentioning it, the smell down there was getting a bit on the fruity side, and I abandoned the Thursday receptions for Paula’s sick bay readings and learned there much more interesting, universal, and philosophic things.

  I have read novels now full of intelligent conversations. In novels there is often a set-piece thrown in called The University or College Conversation. This can take place between students or long afterwards, in the evenings of the students’ days. There are a great many pauses in it and as the pipe smoke rises and the firelight flickers on the rows of mellow old volumes, wisdom and gentle nostalgia hang in the air. The nature of God, the reality of solid objects, the non-existence of Time are touched upon, tossed gently to and fro. Not so with father’s lot. Up with Paula, the floor above—and Paula has had no education at all—we talk on and on about:

  sin

  death


  love

  harmony

  ethics

  particularly ethics, e.g. when Posy Robinson comes in all tearful for his mama and we have only two eggs and two rashers and two spoons of cocoa, our four feet on the fender and a lovely play coming on the wireless after the news.

  But downstairs! Here is a sample of the chat on one of the Learned Thursdays:

  “Cold night.”

  “Rather better.”

  “Pretty cold. Got your coal yet?”

  “No. Got your oil?”

  “No!”

  “Time this House had oil. No more expensive.”

  “Smells.”

  “Not at all. No shovelling what’s more.”

  “Your House has a Man.”

  “Man! Idle oik. If we got oil we could get rid of him.”

  “Get rid of Gunning? Get rid of Gunning?”

  “’Bout time. Been here since the zeppelins.”

  Uneasy pause while it is considered whether Old Price has been here since the zeppelins.

  “I once saw the zeppelins,” says Puffy Coleman kindly. “I was just a boy. There was a burst of flame out over the sea—off Scarborough, and then we saw a lot of little flames dropping into the water. Little flaming men. That was a terrible war.”

  “Terrible.”