Authors: Julian Mitchell
Eventually I got my lapels out of his great fat fists, and by this time Margaret was standing at the front of the stage and saying in an important, busy voice: ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to have lunch with you, Charles, after all. I’m terribly sorry, but you see——’
‘I see absolutely nothing,’ I said, seeing everything. ‘Are you coming or not?’
‘The thing is,’ said the producer, calmer now, ‘we are in the most awful mess, because Joanna has got tonsillitis, and can’t do it, so there
was
only Margaret, and we’ve only got another week of rehearsal before the festival, and will you please go away and let us get on with it.’
I like a man who is simple and to the point like that, so having disengaged him again, this time from my right arm, I said ‘Thank you,’ and left, without, I’m afraid, very much dignity.
Because there was nothing to say at all, and I didn’t feel angry or anything, I just felt that that really was that, at last, and Margaret knew what she wanted, and I didn’t like it, and, well, that was too bad, wasn’t it? But I was terribly sad, too, that it had been so ruthless a betrayal, and I felt almost like crying, and I wondered what to do now, and I went to see Nicholas, and together we looked at the food which still filled the back of my car, and he shook his head and we looked at each other without saying anything, and then we had a brief lunch of cheese sandwiches in the King’s Arms.
Elaine, I can’t sleep, can you, not with everything having started at last, and oh, I can see you from where I’m sitting, I told you, and it’s not fair, I look up and there you are, with your legs tucked up under your chair, do you always sit like that when you have to write, isn’t that funny, I have no idea how you look at lots of times, what do you look like when you’re buying the dinner, how do you look when you’re under the drier, I don’t know anything about you, Elaine, hardly a thing, but I shall, I will, wasn’t it easy this morning, I was so surprised I could have laughed out loud, we must have been good influences on each other for it to have been so easy, but this afternoon I kept looking up and seeing you, with your legs tucked up under the chair, and I wanted to go over to you and ask you, have one of our little talks, when we stop being ourselves and apply our minds, and we get quite angry sometimes, don’t we, as though it mattered whether or not Leavis or Eliot was right about Milton, there’s always Milton, isn’t there, who could care less, after all, as long as you know there are two sides to every question and Milton is somewhere quite different, not in between at all, they can’t fail to give you good marks, excellent marks, in fact. Oh, Elaine, marks don’t matter to you, but they matter to me, terribly, I live on marks, I use them to sprinkle my food like salt, I wouldn’t eat at all if I didn’t have marks, at school I used to get hundreds and hundreds of marks, and I thought they were a great supply, I could always use them, count on them like a hoard of gold, if I ever fell short, because there were so many of them, mark upon mark, and then here they didn’t give marks at all, they gave me letters from an alphabet I’d never
learnt, and the first time I got one I simply didn’t know what it was, it was a beta, in fact, but I looked at it, and looked at it, did I ever tell you, and eventually I thought it must be thirteen, and that didn’t seem much of a mark, and I was terribly upset for ages, I thought it must be out of a hundred, or fifty at least, and thirteen was terribly small and unlucky and low, and then someone explained to me, and I was so relieved, it’s absurd, Elaine, you’ve no idea how ignorant I am about all sorts of things like that, did you ever learn Greek, I think marks are horrible now, they’re too precise and unyielding and like a currency of pebbles, and now we have paper money, Greek letters instead, terribly grand, I went and learnt the whole of the Greek alphabet afterwards, and of course they never go below delta, and I’ve never got lower than gamma/beta, thank goodness, and that was enough of a shock, but I didn’t know, and I learnt the whole thing, I was so ignorant then, Elaine, and I still am about so many things, will I ever learn, do you think, Elaine, you must teach me, you’re my guardian in that, you have to teach me all about so many things, and I’ll try and be a good pupil, but how can I be, there are so many alphabets I don’t know, I’ve learnt so many things, facts to be used and shovelled and put in order and set down and marked and paid for, always to be marked and paid for, and red pencils under the facts that were returned as below standard, and written in red in the margin a lot of facts I didn’t know, a sort of bonus for being a good customer, no, I’ve got that round the wrong way, it doesn’t matter, margins are full of useful things, I’m always going on about my schooldays, I wonder why, I think they were when I became me instead of a coal-miner, that must be it, words and facts and marks, all to be dealt with in certain ways, and if you did it right, you got things instead, as though you were signing cheques, you wrote your name at the top of the page and then you wrote out the names and the numerals and the facts and other people’s ideas about the facts, and they gave you scholarships in return, it’s easy to get on if you do the right things, fill in the right forms with the right answers, and all the answers are there to learn, you just have to apply yourself and learn and learn and learn, and then you won’t have to be a coal-miner, you’ll be much better, you’ll be a teacher, I always loved my teachers, because they could teach me how not to be a coal-miner, I thought it was the most wonderful job in the world, I still do, a teacher was a man who taught you how to write cheques and put money in your bank, a bank of marks, and
sometimes
they were even better, they taught you things that were interesting and exciting and you suddenly thought knowledge was wonderful, the things that the teachers knew and could teach you, but you had to be interested or you never understood how marvellous a teacher could be, he could give you more than money in the bank and cheque-books to write in, he could point things out in the world that you’d never noticed before, make you see things, everything, put colour into the drab world of the mines, I think a good teacher is like an artist, he makes you see things you’ve never thought of, and he excites you, makes you want to see still more, to see new things all the time, he makes you
interested,
but you didn’t have to be interested, of course, and
sometimes
you couldn’t afford to be too interested, if you got too interested it meant that your marks in other subjects would go down, so you had to be careful, you had to know when to stop your interest carrying you away, when to stop listening, or you might find your cheques returned marked ‘Insufficient Funds’ because you have to have funds all the time, Elaine, always there had to be funds, funds, funds, or you couldn’t buy your way to a university, to scholarships, you had to have those, and if you opened your eyes too wide you’d see things that didn’t pay any interest, if you looked about you instead of learning the facts and the words and the numbers, you might go down the mine, so you had to be careful, it’s terrible, the more I think about it, the more terrible it is, the best teachers were the ones I couldn’t listen to all the time, as much as I wanted, because if I did I should work too much for them, and not enough for the bad ones, and there were lots of bad ones, Elaine, and they all counted the same in the end, so I had to be careful, I am careful, aren’t I, you know how careful I am, Elaine, oh but I gave them some good solid words and facts and numbers today, they got what they wanted, enough anyway, they’ll give me a degree for all that, though this afternoon wasn’t too good, was it, Elaine?
But music, that was something I had to find time to listen to, to learn a little about, and it got me no marks, but I had to learn for my own sake, that was Mr Sibley, he used to ask a few of the boys round to his house on Saturday mornings, and he would play Beethoven’s Fifth, and Tchaikovsky, and all the most obvious and popular things, but I would never have heard them at all otherwise, and I don’t think I shall ever love any music as much as I love the things he taught me, like the Mozart
symphonies,
and the Beethoven quartets, which were kept for very
rare occasions when he couldn’t bear to live without them any longer, and didn’t care whether we liked them or not, he played them for himself, and I learnt them, he gave us a taste, that’s what all schoolmasters should do, that’s what they’re for, to give you a taste, to give you lots of tastes, so you can learn to tell what you like, and to know the differences between things, and the difficulties of tasting and judging between tastes, and to make you want to taste more, to make you want to taste as much as possible of all there is in the world, as much as you can before you die, and I’ve tasted so little yet, there has always been the word and the fact and the number to be learnt by tomorrow morning, and to be put in the right order, but we’ve tasted some things together, Elaine, haven’t we, things we taught each other, we’ve tasted a lot, I’d never have tasted so much if it hadn’t been for you, and I still want to be a schoolmaster and teach young people to taste, not because I want to give them banks full of marks, though that too, of course, but to teach them that there are so many tastes in the world, and it’s silly to drown everything in Worcester Sauce and tomato ketchup, we have Worcester Sauce at home, always, always on the table, and ketchup, that too, and they have always been there, and I think they always will be, because Dad thinks they make things tastier, but he drowns the food, he smothers it, and Mum’s not a bad cook with what she can afford, but he’s lost all sense of taste, there are only two tastes left in the world for him, Worcester Sauce and tomato ketchup, and when I see him I sometimes want to cry, because he’s missed so much, but he doesn’t know it, and if he did, he still wouldn’t understand, not now, he doesn’t know how many other tastes there are in the world, I don’t want to be like that, Elaine, I won’t be now, I don’t want our children to be like that, I want them to have more tastes than I shall ever have, we mustn’t be like our fathers and mothers, we mustn’t be shocked at what they like, we must always love them, but we mustn’t get like them, and we must try not to be patronizing about them, it’s not their fault, but it’s difficult, and they can be irritating, can’t they, but we’re human, we can’t hope to be perfect, but we can try, we must just accept that we shall never share tastes with them, and in a way it would be awful if we did, we’d all be the same, which would be awful, don’t you think, Elaine? I shall be able to sleep soon, it would be terrible if I was too tired to sign my cheques tomorrow, after all the time I’ve spent collecting the money, but it’s still quite early, we said good night about eight, did you realize
how early it was, it’s odd how when you’re at home early you don’t know what to do at a time like this, I mean there’s always been you, and we’ve done, oh so much, but now I thought I ought to look at my notes for tomorrow, and I find I know them, I’ve been at this cheque-writing game for so long, I have it all worked out, six points about Shelley, six points about Wordsworth, only five on Byron, I wonder why only five on Byron, but there’s enough for the examiners, and I could write them all down in a nicely shaped little series of essays now, without any difficulty, and I will tomorrow, too, and I’ve always been able to write them down, ever since I had a tutorial on them, and all I have to do is decide which are the questions into which my six points will fit best, and then, there I am, another paper done, another cheque signed, it’s awful in a way, pure machine, but it’s a way, and I’d never get a First however hard I tried, you have to have more imagination than me, more flair, you have to be able to think of new points of your own, and I’m not really interested in thinking up points, I’d rather read poems, I would never know whether my points were good ones or bad ones, and it would never be worth the risk, Elaine, because if they were bad ones, then you’d have had it, you’d have paid out of the bank and got nothing in return, you can do that in tutorials, but not in exams, tutorials are places where your cheques are looked over and examined, the good ones and the bad ones sorted out, so after the tutorial I’ve always stuck to the points, and I suppose I shall always go on sticking to the points all my life, I hope not, I hope I shall grow out of them, and then perhaps I shall find that I’m a real person, and I shall know what I think for myself, and be able to say it, because now I know what I think, sometimes, but I can’t ever say it, I can only say the six points I’ve been taught, the tried and tested six points, some people never get any further at all, it’s terrible, they know only what they’ve been taught, all their lives, and they repeat it whenever they can, which is subhuman, my dad is better than that, he was never taught anything very much, so he’s always had to work things out for himself, and it hasn’t been easy, but he’s got there in his own way, quietly, slowly, but got there, he’s made the effort for himself, and arrived at an answer, not very good answers most of the time, but his own, even if worthless, oh, Elaine, that’s why I’m so frightened of Father Gibbons, he gives out marks, you see, I’m sure that’s why I do what he says, believe what he says, I’ve always accepted whatever my teachers have told me, and they said
if I learnt what they said, and could repeat it and understand it, I’d go to Oxford, and they were right, and here I am, and Father Gibbons says there’s heaven, and if I learn what he says, and
understand
it, I shall go to heaven, and if I do what he says I shall find happiness on earth too, and that’s terribly crude, he doesn’t put it like that, but for me that’s what he’s saying, and I instinctively believe him, because I’ve always believed my teachers and they’ve always been right, but sometimes I can’t believe him, I’m not really a machine at all, I’m a person, and we’ve done what he said, and are we happier, Elaine, we were much happier before, weren’t we, but yet I believe he is right, I can’t get rid of the idea that he must be right, because he’s the teacher, and if I do what he says, then heaven, but can he be right, it’s not like school at all, the world, there are no scholarships to heaven, there is no limit to the number of places available, or to hell, either, and your whole life is an examination, and I have the most terrible doubts about this, I can’t really believe it, and yet I do, I do, I don’t know, Elaine, it’s terribly difficult for me, I can’t make up my mind, and all my life I’ve driven myself to be top of the class, to do exactly what the teacher says, and I’ve always been near the top, not often at the top itself, that’s for the ones who get Firsts, but there are no degrees to heaven, though I’ve always been just behind them, through sheer application, sheer hard grind, all the time, since the eleven-plus, grinding away, Elaine, and now, it was you, Elaine, you who took me to church, and here was a new set of rules, a new alphabet, a new class, and I was so far behind, I hadn’t prepared anything for it, and Father Gibbons will hardly have me in the class at all because we love each other too much for him, too much for the rules of the class, it was like being carried away by a good teacher, the rest of the work suffered, you, I mean, were the good teacher who carried me away, and I had to be careful again, and Father Gibbons is so clear, so positive about it all, and I’m so used to obeying, I don’t know, Elaine, it seems all wrong somehow, but he says it’s all true, one must have faith, I fight every inch of the way for faith, but I’m so weak, and you’re so strong in one way, you never doubt the whole thing, but you’re so weak, too, in another way, it makes it even more difficult, I have to be all for a thing, or not at all, and you believe whatever you want to believe and ignore all the rest, and that’s all right for you, but it won’t do for me, I have to take it all or nothing, I have to understand why they wear certain robes for certain feasts, and why they believe