A Passionate Man (4 page)

Bradley Hall School was housed in an immense eighteenth-century barrack in decayed parkland some seven or eight miles from Winchester. The Hampole family were Catholic, either extremely devout or flamboyantly lapsed, and Bradley Hall had been their home for over a hundred years. It was built in a hollow square around a central courtyard, where a powerfully virile stone Pan rose out of a dry and crumbling fountain basin, and possessed a ballroom, a shattered orangery, a chapel and, in the grounds, an eerie domed ice-house roofed in grass.

It was June Hampole who, twenty-five years before, had decided to start a preparatory school – for both sexes – in the house, in order to enable her and her only unmarried brother to go on living at Bradley Hall. She was rewarded for this enterprise by discovering that she liked children very much indeed and also found them interesting. Her brother Dan was intermittently quite useful over the financial business of the school, but only intermittently, since bad behaviour of an exotic and eighteenth-century kind took up most of his energies. The one thing she could be grateful for was that his unorthodox ideas for pleasure did not include little boys.

Liza, arriving for her interview with Imogen sitting solidly on her hip, was shown into a most desirable room, a small, west-facing panelled room through whose immense floor-length windows the teatime sun was pouring uninhibitedly. The room was in chaos. Books, papers, folders and files were stacked haphazardly on pieces of furniture whose elegance and quality were quite unmistakable. Dirty cups and glasses stood about among plants in pots crying out for water and, in front of the lovely fireplace, two great basset hounds slumbered ponderously. When June Hampole came in, her appearance had exactly the same air of patrician disorder as her room, and in her greying curly hair two flowers of winter jasmine had caught themselves up, like yellow stars.

Liza had liked her at once. June had taken Imogen from her – ‘What a stout little party' – and settled down for the interview with Imogen on her knee, to whom she gave some marvellous sliding old ivory toy for amusement. She seemed only anxious that Liza should be happy working at Bradley Hall.

‘Order, you see, just doesn't seem to come to me naturally. I really do intend to employ you for French, but suppose Mrs West were ill, I might have to shunt you on to Common Entrance English sometimes. Would Latin terrify you? Or mathematics?'

‘Yes,' said Liza. ‘Particularly maths. I learned long before it was taught as a kind of logical exercise.'

‘So fascinating,' June Hampole said, spreading out one of Imogen's fat hands, ‘modern maths. What will you do with this little person if you come here?'

‘I'll find someone—'

‘Sally Carter,' June said. ‘That's who you need! And she must get away from home a bit. Her father manages our farm and he uses Sally as slave labour. Shall I speak to her?'

‘This is extraordinary,' Liza said. ‘No sooner do I express a wish for a job than I am surrounded by people arranging it all for me.'

‘We are
avid
for you,' June Hampole said. She reached for a tarnished silver box and took out of it a piece of shortbread, which she gave to Imogen. The basset hounds, scenting food from the depths of sleep, roused themselves and lumbered over to fix Imogen with lugubrious glares of envy and loathing. Imogen ate her biscuit unperturbed.

It was fixed that Liza should teach French to the three top forms – aged roughly ten to twelve – on two mornings and two afternoons of each week. In her absence at home, Sally Carter looked after Imogen – who rapidly became devoted to her because she was perfectly prepared to sing and play the same baby rhymes and games in endless repetition – and cleaned bits of the house. Liza was shy at first of suggesting she might clean lavatories or the kitchen floor, but Sally said the only thing in the house she'd rather die than do was touch anything fragile or precious, like Liza's Bohemian glass pitchers which stood on the drawing-room mantelpiece. After a few weeks, Sally said she'd come half of Liza's day off, too, and keep the ironing up together, and Liza perceived that the job was a refuge to her as much as anything, and was pleased to agree.

Bradley Hall School was not arduous employment. The classes, never over twenty in number, were composed of children whose upbringing had encouraged discipline of behaviour and outspokenness of mind. None of them were outstandingly clever and the intense parental ambition which Liza remembered from her London teaching days was almost wholly absent. A decent competence was expected, sufficient to get the boys into the right preparatory school before the right public school, and the girls into senior schools which could be trusted not to be exaggeratedly intellectual.

‘Daddy says,' one ten year old said cheerfully to Liza, surveying a French pronoun exercise almost obliterated in red ink, ‘that there's really no hope for me because I'm as utterly thick as him.'

Outside the classroom – Liza taught in a great white drawing room, floored in parquet and furnished entirely with scabrous desks and chairs – the school's eccentricity was manifest. Morning assemblies took place in the chapel before an altar and reredos crowned by a macabre and agonized crucifix brought back from Spain by a nineteenth-century Hampole. The figure on the crucifix, in order to defuse its possible nightmarish effects on the smaller children, was known in the school as Albert. Several pupils went on to their next schools with the conviction that Jesus and Albert were inextricable and interchangeable.

Lunch was eaten at the relatively watertight end of the orangery. June Hampole would have liked the food to be vegetarian, but, faced with relentlessly carnivorous parents, most of whom shot and fished with regularity and competence, she compromised by providing the children with mounds of organically grown vegetables to accompany their sausages and stews. The atmosphere at meals was that of an enormous, excitable family, the younger children being offhandedly helped by the older – ‘For heaven's sake, Matthew, open your stupid mouth' – and the staff member at each table keeping up a proper flow of conversation – ‘Now what is it that makes you think a dog has a conscience?' Breaks were taken in various areas of the park, and running about screaming was encouraged in order to ensure the tranquillity of the ensuing afternoon: ‘Come on, Melissa, haven't heard a really good bellow out of you all week!' Uniform consisted of stout pairs of blue or red drill dungarees worn over home clothes – a great impediment, the junior class teachers discovered, to getting to the lavatory on time – and a blue parka with a quilted lining which was worn indoors as well as out during the winter owing to the volatile temperament of the school boiler. Liza's classes, sitting blowing on their fingers in the glacial drawing room, resembled a Peking assembly line on a winter morning.

The staff room, which Liza grew to relish, had been the gun room of Bradley Hall. Square and darkly panelled with wooden pegged gun racks still in place around the walls, it boasted a cavernous fireplace and a gathering of elderly and welcoming armchairs. On a trestle table under one window stood an electric kettle on a tin tray, and an array of coffee jars and biscuit tins and heavy white mugs, once the property of the local British Legion hut. The room was never dusted or tidied up and you could always rely on finding someone in it to talk to.

Bradley Hall School depended on part-timers. Men and women of all ages who had had, at some point in their lives, some mild brush with teaching, pedalled or drove to Bradley Hall several times a week to teach everything from Greek to the French horn. ‘None of them are exactly mad,' Liza said to Archie, ‘but most of them are pretty odd.' There were three teaching constants: Mrs West, who taught English formidably well along outmoded and grammatical lines; Commander Haythorne, who ran the so-called science department with fierce practicality (‘First thing I do is teach a girl how to change a plug'); and Blaise O'Hanlon. Blaise O'Hanlon was June Hampole's nephew. His Hampole mother had married an Irishman of formidable charm and waywardness, and, when their only son had emerged unsteadily from Trinity College, Dublin, had decided that, if he were not to embark upon the same improvident and wearisome path as his father, he needed a little English stiffening. So she sent him to his aunt June at Bradley Hall, to teach history from a violently Irish standpoint and to supervise soccer, cricket, the school choir and the boiler.

Blaise O'Hanlon told Liza during the second week of her employment that she would save his life.

‘You're lovely,' he said to her, making mugs of coffee for them both in the staff room. ‘I have fantasies about you at night already.' He splashed boiling water from the kettle approximately at its targets. ‘It's your mouth. How am I supposed to keep myself off your mouth?'

Liza had laughed. Blaise O'Hanlon was twenty-two. She was thirty-four and quite in control. She took her coffee mug and went to talk to Commander Haythorne. Blaise followed her.

‘You'll never,' he said to Commander Haythorne, ‘you'll never be keeping this woman from me.'

He hadn't stopped. In the four terms Liza had been at Bradley Hall, Blaise O'Hanlon had never ceased to tell her that she was all he wanted or needed. She had been, by turns, flattered and exasperated. He never tried to touch her and he never spoke to her amorously in front of the children. In the end, she began to feel it was simply a stupid, childish, sexless game, yet if one of her half-days went by without seeing him, she noticed. She would not let herself think she minded, but she noticed. She told Archie, occasionally, things Blaise had said or done, and he laughed. He did not laugh complacently, but with the unselfconsciousness of a man who, being faithful to his wife because he wants to be, assumes the same voluntary fidelity in her.

Sometimes, driving to school along lanes whose seasonal changes were very vivid to Liza – brought up, as she had been, to think of ‘outside' consisting only of a controlled garden – the pleasure of her life struck her forcibly. She liked the shape of it, the small and manageable degree of independence she now had; she liked her country life and in it, her new authority as teacher of the children of so many people who were not only Archie's patients – ‘Good Lord, you Logans, you simply
run
our lives, do you realize?' – but guests at the same parties, members of the same local committees, users of the same shops and services. Catching sight of herself in the driving mirror, she thought she even looked better because of it: less puppy plumpness, more interesting.

The only cloud was Thomas. Liza was afraid that Thomas was the last kind of child who should have been sent away to school. She had been in two minds about it all along and she still was. It was Sir Andrew who had suggested he board to prepare him better for public school, and it was Sir Andrew who was paying. All discussions about it were deeply unsatisfactory, largely because Archie, whose paternal instincts were wholly against the project, was equally at the mercy of filial instincts which made him incapable of overriding his father. They found a school in the New Forest, a jolly-looking place with Labradors in the headmaster's study, and plenty of family photographs and balding teddy bears in the dormitories.

Thomas, white-faced, said he liked it. He went to stay for a night to do some entrance tests and came home saying he liked it. He boasted about it at his day school in Winchester, starting most sentences with ‘When I go to Pinemount . . .' and then occasionally, in the last holidays before he departed, had terrible weeping rages for no reason, and twice, to his unutterable chagrin, wet his bed.

Archie said to him when they were alone cleaning the .22 rifle Archie kept for shooting rabbits, ‘Look, you don't have to go to Pinemount, you know. Nobody's forcing you. Grandpa thought you might like the chance, but a chance is all it is.'

‘I want to,' Thomas said.

‘Sure?'

‘Yes.'

‘There'd be no shame in changing your mind. We'd say at school that we'd changed ours, not you yours.'

‘I don't want to change my mind.'

Liza and Archie took him down to Pinemount together. It looked reassuringly old-fashioned and friendly. Thomas walked away from them holding his old blue stuffed rabbit at arm's length as if he didn't like to be too closely associated with either it or them. There was tea for new boys and their parents which was, Archie said later, the most purgatorial social experience invented by man, and after it, they left Thomas and a few others in the care of an amiable man called George Barnes, who said, for the boys' benefit, that the sooner they could get rid of the parents and get down to business the better.

Liza cried most of the way home and, just the Winchester side of Romsey, Archie had to stop the car because he was crying, too, and couldn't see. He wanted to say to Liza that he felt he had somehow failed both her and Thomas, but he did not say it because she would then have had the added burden of feeling she must comfort him.

After a bit, she blew her nose with resolution and said, ‘Thomas would think we were pathetic.'

‘He's probably not even thinking about us any more—'

‘No.'

‘It couldn't possibly be a happier sort of school.'

‘Oh no.'

‘Liza—?'

‘Yes.'

‘One musn't confuse one's own misery with someone else's imagined misery.'

She said nothing. Archie started the car.

‘Except,' he said, ‘it's imagining his possible misery that creates one's own.'

Thomas was not allowed to write home for ten days. There were all kinds of sound, humane, teacherly reasons for this. When his first letter came, it was in atrocious babyish writing and contained all the resentful unhappiness they had hoped to cheat fate of, by imagining the worst beforehand.