spoke.
Then her father died and left her a sum of money.
‘We could buy a country house,’ her husband said, ‘and open it up as a smart little hotel.’ She agreed that that would be nice. She felt that perhaps neither of them was qualified to run an hotel, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about that, especially since her husband had, without qualifications, joined a step-ladder firm and then, equally unskilled, had gone into the vending-machine business. In fact, their abilities as hoteliers were never put to the test because all of a sudden her husband had a better idea. Idling one evening in a saloon bar, he dropped into conversation with a man who was in a state of depression because his son appeared to be a dunce.
‘If I was starting again,’ said the man, ‘I’d go into the cramming business. My God, you could coin it.’ The man talked on, speaking of parents like himself who couldn’t hold their heads up because their children’s poor performances in the Common Entrance examination deprived them of an association with one of the great public schools of England. The next day Mrs Digby-Hunter’s husband scrutinized bound volumes of the Common Entrance examination papers.
‘A small boarding-school,’ he later said to her, ‘for temporarily backward boys; we might do quite nicely.’ Mrs Digby-Hunter, who did not immediately take to the notion of being surrounded day and night by temporarily backward boys, said that the idea sounded an interesting one. ‘There’s a place for sale in Gloucestershire,’ her husband said.
The school, begun as a small one, remained so because, as her husband explained, any school of this nature must be small. The turnover in boys was rapid, and it soon became part of the educational policy of Milton Grange to accept not more than twenty boys at any one time, the wisdom of which was reflected in results that parents and headmasters agreed were remarkable: the sons who had idled at the back of their preparatory school classrooms passed into the great public schools of England, and their parents paid the high fees of Milton Grange most gratefully.
At Milton Grange, part ivy-clad, turreted and baronial, Mrs Digby-Hunter was happy. She did not understand the ins and outs of the Common Entrance examination, for her province was the kitchen and the dormitories, but certainly life at Milton Grange as the headmaster’s wife was much more like it than occupying half the ground floor of a semi-detached villa in Croydon, as the wife of a vending-machine operator.
‘Christ, what a time we’re having with that boy for Harrow,’ her husband would say, and she would make a sighing noise to match the annoyance he felt, and smile to cheer him up. It was extraordinary what he had achieved with the dullards he took on, and she now and again wondered if one day he might even receive a small recognition, an OBE maybe. As for her, Milton Grange was recognition enough: an apt reward, she felt, for her marital agreeableness, for not being a nuisance, and coming up to scratch as a wife.
Just occasionally Mrs Digby-Hunter wondered what life would have been like if she’d married someone else. She wondered what it would have been like to have had children of her own and to have engaged in the activity that caused, eventually, children to be born. She imagined, once a year or so, as she lay alone in her room in the darkness, what it would be like to share a double bed night after night. She imagined a faceless man, a pale naked body beside hers, hands caressing her flesh. She imagined, occasionally, being married to a clergyman she’d known as a girl, a man who had once embraced her with intense passion, suddenly, after a dance in a church hall. She had experienced the pressure of his body against hers and she could recall still the smell of his clothes and the dampness of his mouth.
But Milton Grange was where she belonged now: she had chosen a man and married him and had ended up, for better or worse, in a turreted house in Gloucestershire. There was give and take in marriage, as always she had known, and where she was concerned there was everything to be thankful for. Once a year, on the last Saturday in July, the gardens of the school were given over to a Conservative fete, and more regularly she and her husband drove to other country houses, for dinner or cocktails. A local Boy Scout group once asked her to present trophies on a sports day because she was her husband’s wife and he was well regarded. She had enjoyed the occasion and had bought new clothes specially for it.
In winter she put down bulbs, and in spring she watched the birds collecting twigs and straw for nests. She loved the gardens and often repeated to the maids in the kitchen that one was ‘nearer God’s Heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth’. It was a beautiful sentiment, she said, and very true.
On that June afternoon, while Mrs Digby-Hunter dropped into a doze beneath the beech trees and Sergeant Wall removed the weeds from a herbaceous border, the bearded Mr Beade walked between two rows of desks in a bare attic room. Six boys bent over the desks, writing speedily. In the room next door six other boys wrote also. They would not be idling, Mr Beade knew, any more than the boys in the room across the corridor would be idling.
They looked a moment longer. Sergeant Wall in the far distance pushed himself from his knees on to his feet. ‘He’s coming in for his tea,’ said Barbara. She held cigarette smoke in her mouth and then released it in short puffs. ‘She can’t think,’ said Dympna, ‘She’s incapable of mental activity.’ ‘She’s a dead white slug,’ said Barbara.
They cupped their cigarettes in their hands for the journey down the back stairs to the kitchen. They both were thinking that the kettle would be boiling on the Aga: it would be pleasant to sit in the cool, big kitchen drinking tea with old Sergeant Wall, who gossiped about the village he lived in. It was Dympna’s turn to make his sandwich, turkey paste left over from yesterday, the easy-to-spread margarine that Mrs Digby-Hunter said was better for you than butter. ‘Dead white slug,’ repeated Barbara, laughing on the stairs. ‘Was she human once?’
Sergeant Wall passed by the sleeping Mrs Digby-Hunter and heard, just perceptibly, a soft snoring coming from her partially open mouth. She was tired, he thought; heat made women tired, he’d often heard. He removed his hat and wiped an accumulation of sweat from the crown of his head. He moved towards the house for his tea.
In his study Digby-Hunter sat with one boy, Marshalsea, listening while Marshalsea repeated recently acquired information about triangles.
‘Then DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘must be equal in all respects to –’
‘Why?’ inquired Digby-Hunter.
