house to the fearsome Victorian larder and put the bottle on an inconveniently high shelf so that he wouldn’t be tempted to have any more. Then he went back to his study for the few minutes that remained before the evening prayers he held once a week for the school, which were compulsory for the under-fourteens, voluntary for the seniors, and usually surprisingly well attended. He put this down not so much to godliness as to the boys’ instinctive recognition of the particular and mysterious atmosphere of evening worship; you could see by their faces how many of them were moved. If he needed to chastise a boy, an interview after compline was usually successful on both sides.
Felicity often said to him how enormously romantic she found men and boys to be. “Look at them,” she would say to him when the school was gathered before them. “They really believe in the possibility of their dreams. They really do.” She had sounded so yearning, almost envious. He knew she dreamed dreams and that the only outlet for the near-visionary outbursts of her imagination was these poems, worked over endlessly and painfully. He also knew of her immense womanly practicality, a realism that must sometimes have seemed to her an enemy to her poetic perception. And yet both were rooted in her, made her up, made her the elusive and adorable person she was and also, probably, drove her near to despair, drove her to run away as a physical release from a locked-together combat of mind and spirit. Perhaps—he turned the idea over gingerly in his mind—perhaps it nearly broke her up not to be able to believe consistently in her dreams and visions. He wished she would talk to him about it. He wished she would tell him what, if anything, about their way of life, or indeed him, she could not bear. She had always been self-contained, which had given her a graceful dignity that was one of the things that had drawn him to her at the outset, but as she got older, she had dug deeper into herself, and he had to resort to her poems to try to understand and they were often most obscure. She never reproached him; she always smiled and was loving but
lightly
loving, almost absentminded sometimes. Itwas alarming how much he missed her. Suppose that this time she did not come back, and suppose that the council compulsorily bought this lovely house and he was put into the empty flat at the top of the school’s main building, where he would grow to dread the holidays and doubtless take to the bottle?
He straightened himself abruptly. This would not do. He had always announced that next to hysteria, he abhorred self-pity in anyone. He would go upstairs and brush his teeth vigorously before he went down to compline because the boys so delighted in sniffing the air like hounds to detect, gleefully, the faintest breath of alcohol around any member of staff after six o’clock at night. “Glugging gin in cupboards,” Leo Beckford had once said, “the minute the clock strikes six. That’s what they think we do.”
Ianthe Cavendish, down from London for the weekend, made the taxi drop her at the top of the Lyng. That way, she could slip round the close of the deanery via the little sixteenth-century yard on the northern side, where the chapter office was and the cathedral works yard, and where, in a pair of lurching timbered houses, the organist and the assistant organist lived side by side. The assistant organist, Martin Chancellor, had a wife and a baby, and a basket of lobelias and striped pelargoniums hung outside his front door and his knocker was polished and there were three clean empty milk bottles in a special little crate on the step. The curtains were drawn, and no doubt behind them Martin and Cherry Chancellor—who both taught part-time in city schools—were marking books or watching BBC2 with the washing-up done and the baby asleep and breakfast already laid for the morning.
Leo’s curtains were not drawn, as Ianthe had known they wouldn’t be.
Felicity often said to him how enormously romantic she found men and boys to be. “Look at them,” she would say to him when the school was gathered before them. “They really believe in the possibility of their dreams. They really do.” She had sounded so yearning, almost envious. He knew she dreamed dreams and that the only outlet for the near-visionary outbursts of her imagination was these poems, worked over endlessly and painfully. He also knew of her immense womanly practicality, a realism that must sometimes have seemed to her an enemy to her poetic perception. And yet both were rooted in her, made her up, made her the elusive and adorable person she was and also, probably, drove her near to despair, drove her to run away as a physical release from a locked-together combat of mind and spirit. Perhaps—he turned the idea over gingerly in his mind—perhaps it nearly broke her up not to be able to believe consistently in her dreams and visions. He wished she would talk to him about it. He wished she would tell him what, if anything, about their way of life, or indeed him, she could not bear. She had always been self-contained, which had given her a graceful dignity that was one of the things that had drawn him to her at the outset, but as she got older, she had dug deeper into herself, and he had to resort to her poems to try to understand and they were often most obscure. She never reproached him; she always smiled and was loving but
lightly
loving, almost absentminded sometimes. Itwas alarming how much he missed her. Suppose that this time she did not come back, and suppose that the council compulsorily bought this lovely house and he was put into the empty flat at the top of the school’s main building, where he would grow to dread the holidays and doubtless take to the bottle?
He straightened himself abruptly. This would not do. He had always announced that next to hysteria, he abhorred self-pity in anyone. He would go upstairs and brush his teeth vigorously before he went down to compline because the boys so delighted in sniffing the air like hounds to detect, gleefully, the faintest breath of alcohol around any member of staff after six o’clock at night. “Glugging gin in cupboards,” Leo Beckford had once said, “the minute the clock strikes six. That’s what they think we do.”
Ianthe Cavendish, down from London for the weekend, made the taxi drop her at the top of the Lyng. That way, she could slip round the close of the deanery via the little sixteenth-century yard on the northern side, where the chapter office was and the cathedral works yard, and where, in a pair of lurching timbered houses, the organist and the assistant organist lived side by side. The assistant organist, Martin Chancellor, had a wife and a baby, and a basket of lobelias and striped pelargoniums hung outside his front door and his knocker was polished and there were three clean empty milk bottles in a special little crate on the step. The curtains were drawn, and no doubt behind them Martin and Cherry Chancellor—who both taught part-time in city schools—were marking books or watching BBC2 with the washing-up done and the baby asleep and breakfast already laid for the morning.
Leo’s curtains were not drawn, as Ianthe had known they wouldn’t be.
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