inaccurate of perception, brash, uncertain among these immovable families and seats of primeval habitation, distracted between the sophistication of these elegant border women, active and emancipated, and those dark racial memories of theirs, that mould so much of what they do and say? Sybil had no terms of reference. She would be as irrelevant and lost here as he had been, that first week of term.
Mathematics, thank God, is much the same everywhere, and he was a perfectly competent teacher, he had only to cling firmly to his work for a few weeks and the rest fell readily into place. He knew he could teach, headmasters didn’t have to tell him that. And all things considered, the first half of his first term hadn’t gone badly at all.
The school buildings were old but good, encrusted with new blocks behind, and a shade cramped for parking space, though with a Mini he didn’t have to worry overmuch about that. He hadn’t been prepared to find so many sons of wealthy commuting business-men from the Black Country at school here in the marches, and their lavish standard of living had somewhat daunted him, until he ran his nose unexpectedly into the headmaster’s characteristic notice on the hall board:
‘Will the Sixth Form please refrain from encroaching on the Staff parking ground, as their Jaguars and Bentleys are giving the resident 1955 Fords an inferiority complex.’
That had set him up again in his own esteem. And the long-legged seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who emerged from the parental cars, in spite of their resplendent transport, were not otherwise hopelessly spoiled, and had a shrewd grasp of the amount of work that would keep them out of trouble, and an equable disposition to produce the requisite effort, with a little over for luck. They seemed to Tom Kenyon at once more mature and developed and more spontaneous and young than the southern product with which he was more familiar, and on occasions, when they were shaken out of their equilibrium by something totally unexpected, alarmingly candid and abrupt. But they were resilient, they recovered their balance with admirable aplomb. Usually they were pulling his leg before he’d realised they no longer needed nursing. They weren’t a bad lot.
Even the staff were easy enough. Even the three women for whom he hadn’t been prepared. Jane Darrill, the junior geographer, could be a bit offhand and you-be-damned when she liked, but of course she was very young, not above twenty-five. Tom was twenty-six himself.
It was Jane who had suggested he should move out to the village of Comerford for living quarters, and put him in touch with the Becks, who had a house too big for them, and an income, on the whole, rather too small.
‘If you’re going to be a countryman,’ said Jane, with her suspiciously private smile, that always made his hackles rise a little in the conviction that she was somehow making fun of him, ‘you might as well go the whole hog and be a proper one. Come and be a borderer, like me. Comerford is the real thing. This dump is rapidly becoming a suburb of Birmingham.’
That was an exaggeration, or perhaps a prophecy. Jane was blessed, or cursed, with an appearance of extreme competence and cheerfulness, round-faced, fair-complexioned, vigorous, pretty enough if she hadn’t filed her brusque manner to an aggressive edge in order to keep the Lower Sixth in healthy awe of her. Sometimes she liked to offset the impression by leaning perversely towards cynicism and gloom.
Tom looked out of the common-room window upon a Comerbourne which appeared to his urban eye small, limited, antique and charming. He could see the tops of the limes in the riverside gardens, a thin ribbon of silver, the balustrade of the nearer bridge over the Comer. A provincial capital of the minor persuasion, still clinging to its weekly country market, still drawing in, to buy and sell, half the housewives and farmwives of a quarter of Wales as well as Midshire itself. Back-streets straight out of the Middle Ages, a few superb Tudor pubs, a dwindling county society more blood-ridden and exclusive than he’d thought possible in the mid-twentieth century, still conscientiously freezing out intruders, and pathetically unaware that its island of privilege had long since become an island of stagnation in a backwater of impotence, and was crumbling away piecemeal from under its large, sensibly-shod feet; and round it and over it, oblivious of it, swarmed the busy, brisk, self-confident rush of the new people, the new powers, business and banking and industry and administration, advancing upon an expanding future, brushing with faint impatience and no ceremony past the petrified remnants of a feudal past.
That was what he saw in Comerbourne; and to tell the truth, the encroachments of the industrial Midlands into the fossilised life of this remote capital rather attracted than repelled him. But he’d never lived in a village, and the idea still had a (probably quite misleading) charm about it. He thought vaguely of country pursuits and country functions, and saw himself adopted into a village society which would surely not be averse to finding a place for a young and presentable male, whatever his origins. He could have the best of both worlds, with Comerbourne only a couple of miles away, near enough to be reached easily when he needed it, far enough away to be easily evaded when he had no need of it. And it’s always a good idea to put at least a couple of miles between yourself and your work in the evenings.
‘What are these Becks like?’ he asked, half in love with the idea but cautious still.
‘Oh, ordinary. Middle-aged, retired, a bit stodgy, maybe. Terribly conscientious, they’ll probably worry about whether they’re doing enough for you. Not amusing, but then you needn’t rely on them for your amusement, need you? Mr Beck used to teach at the Modern until a couple of years ago. He never made it to a headship. Not headmaster material,’ she said rather dryly. Tom Kenyon, confident, clever and ambitious, was obvious headmaster material, and, moreover, knew it very well.
‘He hasn’t got a son here, has he?’ asked Tom sharply, suddenly shaken by the thought of having his landlady’s darling under his feet, with a fond mamma pushing persuasively behind. He wished it back the moment it was out. A silly question. Jane wouldn’t be such a fool as to land him in any such situation, it would be against all her teacher’s instincts, and they were shrewd and effective enough. And blurting out the horrid thought had only exposed himself. But she merely gave him the edge of a deflationary smile, and rattled away half a dozen rock specimens into the back of her table drawer.
‘No sons at all, don’t worry. “He has but one daughter, an uncommon handsome gel”.’
‘Go on!’ He wasn’t particularly interested, but he produced the spark in the eye and the sharpening glow of attention that was demanded of him, and straightened his tie with exaggeratedly fatuous care. ‘How old?’
‘Eighteen, I think! She was seventeen last spring, anyhow, when the row—’ She frowned and swallowed the word, shoving away papers; but he hadn’t been listening closely enough to demand or even miss the rest of the sentence.
‘Eighteen, and uncommon handsome! That does it! They won’t look at me, they’ll be after some old gorgon of a maiden aunt for a lodger.’
Jane turned her fashionable shock-head of mangled brown hair and grinned at him derisively. ‘Come off it!’ she said. ‘You’re not that dangerous.’ It had been a joke, and all that, but she needn’t have sounded so crushingly sure of herself. Girls had never given him much trouble, except by clinging too long and tightly, and at the wrong times.
‘What’s her name?’ he asked.
