The Collected Stories

‘Who’d your mum run off with?’ Carson asked.

‘No one.’

‘Your dad run off then?’

‘Yes.’

His mother had told him that his father left her because they didn’t get on any more. He hadn’t left her because he knew Gillian. He hadn’t met Gillian for years after that.

‘D’you like her?’ Andrews asked. ‘Gillian?’

‘She’s all right. They’ve got twins now, my dad and Gillian. Girls.’

‘I’d hate it if my mum and dad got divorced,’ Tichbourne said.

‘Mine quarrelled all last holidays,’ Carson said, ‘about having a room decorated.’

‘Can’t stand it when they quarrel,’ Andrews said.

Intrigued by a situation that was strange to them, the other boys often asked after that about the divorce. How badly did people have to quarrel before they decided on one? Was Gillian different from Michael’s mother? Did Michael’s mother hate her? Did she hate his father?

‘They never see one another,’ Michael said. ‘She’s not like Gillian at all.’

At the end of the term the staff put on a show called Staff Laughs. Cocky Marshall was incarcerated all during one sketch in a wooden container that was meant to be a steam bath. Something had gone wrong with it. The steam was too hot and the catch had become jammed. Cocky Marshall was red in the face and nobody knew if he was putting it on or not until the end of the sketch, when he stepped out of the container in his underclothes. Mr Waydelin had to wear a kilt in another sketch and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard were dressed up in rugby togs, with Cocky Marshall’s and Mr Brine’s scrum caps. The Reverend Green – mathematics and divinity – was enthusiastically applauded in his Mrs Wagstaffe sketch. A.J.L. did his magic, and as a grand finale the whole staff, including Miss Brooks, sang together, arm-in-arm, on the small stage. ‘We’re going home,’ they sang. ‘We’re going home. We’re on the way that leads to home. We’ve seen the good things and the bad and now we’re absolutely mad. We’re g-o-i-n-g home.’ All the boys joined in the chorus, and that night in Michael’s dormitory they ate Crunchie, Galaxy and Mars Bars and didn’t wash their teeth afterwards. At half past twelve the next day Michael’s mother was waiting for him at Paddington.

At home, nothing was different. On Saturdays his father came and drove him away to the house near Cranleigh. His mother talked about Dolores Welsh and Mr Ashaf. She hadn’t returned to work in the West End. It was quite nice really, she said, at Mr Ashaf’s.

Christmas came and went. His father gave him a new Triang locomotive and Gillian gave him a pogo-stick and the twins a magnet and a set of felt pens. His mother decorated the flat and put fairy-lights on a small Christmas tree. She filled his stocking on Christmas Eve when he was asleep and the next day, after they’d had their Christmas dinner, she gave him a football and a glove puppet and a jigsaw of Windsor Castle. He gave her a brooch he’d bought in Woolworth’s. On January 14th he returned to Elton Grange.

Nothing was different at Elton Grange either, except that Cocky Marshall had left. Nobody had known he was going to leave, and some boys said he had been sacked. But others denied that, claiming that he’d gone of his own accord, without giving the required term’s notice. They said A.J.L. was livid.

Three weeks passed, and then one morning Michael received a letter from his father saying that neither he nor Gillian would be able to come at half-term because he had to go to Tunisia on business and wanted to take Gillian with him. He sent some money to make up for the disappointment.

In a letter to his mother, not knowing what to say because nothing much was happening, Michael revealed that his father wouldn’t be there at half-term. Then I shall come, his mother wrote back.

She stayed, not in the Grand, but in a boarding-house called Sans Souci, which had coloured gnomes fishing in a pond in the front garden, and a black gate with one hinge broken. They weren’t able to have lunch there on the Saturday because the woman who ran it, Mrs Malone, didn’t do lunches. They had lunch in the Copper Kettle, and since Mrs Malone didn’t do teas either they had tea in the Copper Kettle as well. They walked around the town between lunch and tea, and after tea they sat together in his mother’s bedroom until it was time to catch the bus back to school.

The next day she said she’d like to see over the school, so he brought her into the chapel, which once had been the gate-lodge, and into the classrooms and the gymnasium and the art-room and the changing-rooms. In the carpentry shop the P.T. instructor was making a cupboard. ‘Who’s that boy?’ his mother whispered, unfortunately just loud enough for the P.T. instructor to hear. He smiled. Swagger Browne, who was standing about doing nothing, giggled.

‘But how could he be a boy?’ Michael asked dismally, leading the way on the cinder path that ran around the cricket pitch. ‘Boys at Elton only go up to thirteen and a half.’

‘Oh dear, of course,’ his mother said. She began to talk of other things. She spoke quickly. Dolores Welsh, she thought, was going to get married, Mr Ashaf had wrenched his arm. She’d spoken to the landlord about the damp that kept coming in the bathroom, but the landlord had said that to cure it would mean a major upheaval for them.

All the time she was speaking, while they walked slowly on the cinder path, he kept thinking about the P.T. instructor, unable to understand how his mother could ever have mistaken him for a boy. It was a cold morning and rather damp, not raining heavily, not even drizzling, but misty in a particularly wetting kind of way. He wondered where they were going to go for lunch, since the woman in the Copper Kettle had said yesterday that the cafe didn’t open on Sundays.

‘Perhaps we could go and look at the dormitories?’ his mother suggested when they came to the end of the cinder path.

He didn’t want to, but for some reason he felt shy about saying so. If he said he didn’t want to show her the dormitories, she’d ask him why and he wouldn’t know what to say because he didn’t know himself.

‘All right,’ he said.

They walked through the dank mist, back to the school buildings, which were mostly of red brick, some with a straggle of Virginia creeper on them. The new classrooms, presented a year ago by the father of a boy who had left, were of pinker brick than the rest. The old classrooms had been nicer, Michael’s father said: they’d once been the stables.

There were several entrances to the house itself. The main one, approached from the cricket pitch by crossing