addressing the children. ‘Our place was riddled with fancy larks like that. Remember?’ he added, turning to Mace- Hamilton.
‘A male tart,’ Torridge explained.
The Arrowsmith boys gaped at him, the older one with his mouth actually open. The Wiltshire twins began to giggle again. The Arrowsmith girl frowned, unable to hide her interest.
‘The Honourable Anthony Swain,’ Torridge said, ‘was no better than a whore.’
Mrs Arrowsmith, who for some minutes had been engaged with her own thoughts, was suddenly aware that the man who was in the button business was talking about sex. She gazed diagonally across the table at him, astonished that he should be talking in this way.
‘Look here, Torridge,’ Wiltshire said, frowning at him and shaking his head. With an almost imperceptible motion he gestured towards the wives and children.
‘Andrews and Butler. Dillon and Pratt. Tothill and Goldfish Stewart. Your dad,’ Torridge said to the Arrowsmith girl, ‘was always very keen. Sainsbury Major in particular.’
‘Now look here,’ Arrowsmith shouted, beginning to get to his feet and then changing his mind.
‘My gosh, how they broke chaps’ hearts, those three!’
‘Please don’t talk like this.’ It was Mrs Wiltshire who protested, to everyone’s surprise, most of all her own. ‘The children are quite young, Mr Torridge.’
Her voice had become a whisper. She could feel herself reddening with embarrassment, and a little twirl of sickness occurred in her stomach. Deferentially, as though appreciating the effort she had made, Torridge apologized.
‘I think you’d better go,’ Arrowsmith said.
‘You were right about God Harvey, Arrows. Gay as a grig he was, beneath that cassock. So was Old Frosty, as a matter of fact.’
‘Really!’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton cried, her bewilderment turning into outrage. She glared at her husband, demanding with her eyes that instantly something should be done. But her husband and his two friends were briefly stunned by what Torridge had claimed for God Harvey. Their schooldays leapt back at them, possessing them for a vivid moment: the dormitory, the dining-hall, the glances and the invitations, the meetings behind Chapel. It was somehow in keeping with the school’s hypocrisy that God Harvey had had inclinations himself, that a rumour begun as an outrageous joke should have contained the truth.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Torridge went on, ‘I wouldn’t be what I am if it hadn’t been for God Harvey. I’m what they call queer,’ he explained to the children. ‘I perform sexual acts with men.’
‘For God’s sake, Torridge,’ Arrowsmith shouted, on his feet, his face the colour of ripe strawberry, his watery eyes quivering with rage.
‘It was nice of you to invite me tonight, Arrows. Our
People spoke at once, Mrs Mace-Hamilton and Mrs Wiltshire, all three men. Mrs Arrowsmith sat still. What she was thinking was that she had become quietly drunk while her husband had more boisterously reached the same condition. She was thinking, as well, that by the sound of things he’d possessed as a boy a sexual urge that was a lot livelier than the one he’d once exposed her to and now hardly ever did. With boys who had grown to be men he had had a whale of a time. Old Frosty had been a kind of Mr Chips, she’d been told. She’d never ever heard of Sainsbury Major or God Harvey.
‘It’s quite disgusting,’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton’s voice cried out above the other voices. She said the police should be called. It was scandalous to have to listen to unpleasant conversation like this. She began to say the children should leave the dining-room, but changed her mind because it appeared that Torridge himself was about to go. ‘You’re a most horrible man,’ she cried.
Confusion gathered, like a fog around the table. Mrs Wiltshire, who knew that her husband had committed adultery with Mrs Arrowsmith, felt another bout of nerves in her stomach. ‘Because she was starved, that’s why,’ her husband had almost violently confessed when she’d discovered. ‘I was putting her out of her misery.’ She had wept then and he had comforted her as best he could. She had not told him that he had never succeeded in arousing in her the desire to make love: she had always assumed that to be a failing in herself, but now for some reason she was not so sure. Nothing had been directly said that might have caused this doubt, but an instinct informed Mrs Wiltshire that the doubt should be there. The man beside her smiled his brittle, malevolent smile at her, as if in sympathy.
With his head bent over the table and his hands half hiding his face, the younger Arrowsmith boy examined his father by glancing through his fingers. There were men whom his parents warned him against, men who would sit beside you in buses or try to give you a lift in a car. This man who had come tonight, who had been such a joke up till now, was apparently one of these, not a joke at all. And the confusion was greater: at one time, it seemed, his father had been like that too.
The Arrowsmith girl considered her father also. Once she had walked into a room in Lagos to find her mother in the arms of an African clerk. Ever since she had felt sorry for her father. There’d been an unpleasant scene at the time, she’d screamed at her mother and later in a fury had told her father what she’d seen. He’d nodded, wearily seeming not to be surprised, while her mother had miserably wept. She’d put her arms around her father, comforting him; she’d felt no mercy for her mother, no sympathy or understanding. The scene formed vividly in her mind as she sat at the dinner table: it appeared to be relevant in the confusion and yet not clearly so. Her parents’ marriage was messy, messier than it had looked. Across the table her mother grimly smoked, focusing her eyes with difficulty. She smiled at her daughter, a soft, inebriated smile.
The older Arrowsmith boy was also aware of the confusion. Being at a school where the practice which had been spoken of was common enough, he could easily believe the facts that had been thrown about. Against his will, he was forced to imagine what he had never imagined before: his father and his friends as schoolboys, engaged in passion with other boys. He might have been cynical about this image but he could not. Instead it made him want to gasp. It knocked away the smile that had been on his face all evening.
The Wiltshire twins unhappily stared at the white tablecloth, here and there stained with wine or gravy. They, too, found they’d lost the urge to smile and instead shakily blinked back tears.
