The Collected Stories

darkness after lights-out someone was trying not to sob and Torridge’s voice was piping away, not homesick in the least. His father had a button business was what he was saying: he’d probably be going into the button business himself. In the morning he was identified, a boy in red-and-blue striped pyjamas, still chattering in the wash-room. ‘What’s your father do, Torridge?’ Arrowsmith asked at breakfast, and that was the beginning. ‘Dad’s in the button business,’ Torridge beamingly replied. ‘Torridge’s, you know.’ But no one did know.

He didn’t, as other new boys did, make a particular friend. For a while he attached himself to a small gang of homesick boys who had only their malady in common, but after a time this gang broke up and Torridge found himself on his own, though it seemed quite happily so. He was often to be found in the room of the kindly housemaster of junior House, an ageing white-haired figure called Old Frosty, who listened sympathetically to complaints of injustice at the hands of other masters, always ready to agree that the world was a hard place. ‘You should hear Buller Yeats on Torridge, sir,’ Wiltshire used to say in Torridge’s presence. ‘You’d think Torridge had no feelings, sir.’ Old Frosty would reply that Buller Yeats was a frightful man. ‘Take no notice, Torridge,’ he’d add in his kindly voice, and Torridge would smile, making it clear that he didn’t mind in the least what Buller Yeats said. ‘Torridge knows true happiness,’ a new young master, known as Mad Wallace, said in an unguarded moment one day, a remark which caused immediate uproar in a geography class. It was afterwards much repeated, like ‘Dad’s in the button business’ and ‘Torridge’s, you know.’ The true happiness of Torridge became a joke, the particular property of Wiltshire and Mace-Hamilton and Arrowsmith. Furthering the joke, they claimed that knowing Torridge was a rare experience, that the private realm of his innocence and his happiness was even exotic. Wiltshire insisted that one day the school would be proud of him. The joke was worked to death.

At the school it was the habit of certain senior boys to ‘take an interest in’ juniors. This varied from glances and smiles across the dining-hall to written invitations to meet in some secluded spot at a stated time. Friendships, taking a variety of forms, were then initiated. It was flattering, and very often a temporary antidote for homesickness, when a new boy received the agreeable but bewildering attentions of an important fifth-former. A meeting behind Chapel led to the negotiating of a barbed-wire fence on a slope of gorse bushes, the older boy solicitous and knowledgeable. There were well-trodden paths and nooks among the gorse where smoking could take place with comparative safety. Farther afield, in the hills, there were crude shelters composed of stones and corrugated iron. Here, too, the emphasis was on smoking and romance.

New boys very soon became aware of the nature of older boys’ interest in them. The flattery changed its shape, an adjustment was made – or the new boys retreated in panic from this area of school life. Andrews and Butler, Webb and Mace-Hamilton, Dillon and Pratt, Tothill and Goldfish Stewart, Good and Wiltshire, Sainsbury Major and Arrowsmith, Brewitt and Whyte: the liaisons were renowned, the combinations of names sometimes seeming like a music-hall turn, a soft-shoe shuffle of entangled hearts. There was faithlessness, too: the Honourable Anthony Swain made the rounds of the senior boys, a fickle and tartish bijou, desired and yet despised.

Torridge’s puddingy appearance did not suggest that he had bijou qualities, and glances did not readily come his way in the dining-hall. This was often the fate, or good fortune, of new boys and was not regarded as a sign of qualities lacking. Yet quite regularly an ill-endowed child would mysteriously become the object of fifth- and sixth-form desire. This remained a puzzle to the juniors until they themselves became fifth –or sixth-formers and desire was seen to have to do with something deeper than superficial good looks.

It was the apparent evidence of this truth that caused Torridge, first of all, to be aware of the world of bijou and protector. He received a note from a boy in the Upper Fifth who had previously eschewed the sexual life offered by the school. He was a big, black-haired youth with glasses and a protruding forehead, called Fisher.

‘Hey, what’s this mean?’ Torridge inquired, finding the note under his pillow, tucked into his pyjamas. ‘Here’s a bloke wants to go for a walk.’

He read the invitation out: ‘If you would like to come for a walk meet me by the electricity plant behind Chapel. Half past four Tuesday afternoon. R.A.J. Fisher.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Armstrong.

‘You’ve got an admirer, Porridge,’ Mace-Hamilton said.

‘Admirer?’

‘He wants you to be his bijou,’ Wiltshire explained.

‘What’s it mean, bijou?’

‘Tart, it means, Porridge.’

‘Tart?’

‘Friend. He wants to be your protector.’

‘What’s it mean, protector?’

‘He loves you, Porridge.’

‘I don’t even know the bloke.’

‘He’s the one with the big forehead. He’s a half-wit actually.’

‘Half-wit?’

‘His mother let him drop on his head. Like yours did, Porridge.’

‘My mum never.’

Everyone was crowding around Torridge’s bed. The note was passed from hand to hand. ‘What’s your dad do, Porridge?’ Wiltshire suddenly asked, and Torridge automatically replied that he was in the button business.

‘You’ve got to write a note back to Fisher, you know,’ Mace-Hamilton pointed out.

‘Dear Fisher,’ Wiltshire prompted, ‘I love you.’

‘But I don’t even –’

‘It doesn’t matter not knowing him. You’ve got to write a letter and put it in his pyjamas.’

Torridge didn’t say anything. He placed the note in the top pocket of his jacket and slowly began to undress. The other boys drifted back to their own beds, still amused by the development. In the wash-room the next morning Torridge said: