When she’d said his name was Lairdman, Boland had remembered the name from his schooldays. Vaguely, he’d guessed that the man she was telling him about was a boy he couldn’t quite place. But knowing the name, he’d recognized in Buswell’s bar the adult features immediately.
‘ “Where did you meet him?” That doesn’t matter either. And yet you ask it.’
‘Annabella and I –’
‘I know, I know.’
At school Lairdman had been notorious for an unexpected reason: his head had been held down a lavatory while his hair was scrubbed with a lavatory brush. Roche and Dead Smith had done it, the kind of thing they tended to do if they suspected uppitiness. Roche and Dead Smith were the bullies of their time, doling out admonitions to new boys who arrived at the school in the summer or winter terms rather than the autumn one, or to boys whose faces they found irritating. Lairdman’s head had been scrubbed with the lavatory brush because he kept his hair tidy with perfumed oil that was offensive to Dead Smith.
‘I think we were at school together,’ Boland said.
Lairdman almost gave a jump, and it was Boland, this time, who disguised his smile. His wife would not have remembered the name of the school in question, not being in the least interested: the coincidence had clearly not been established.
‘I don’t recollect a Boland,’ Lairdman said.
‘I’d have been a little senior to yourself.’ Deliberately, Boland sounded apologetic. ‘But when she said your name I wondered. I was one of the boarders. Up from the country, you know. Terrible bloody place.’
Thirteen boarders there’d been, among nearly a hundred day boys. The day boys used to come noisily up the short, suburban avenue on their bicycles, and later ride noisily away. They were envied because they were returning to warmth and comfort and decent food, because after the weekends they’d talk about how they’d been to the Savoy or the Adelphi or even to the Crystal Ballroom. The boarders in winter would crouch around a radiator in one of the classrooms; in summer they’d walk in twos and threes around the playing-fields. The school matron, a Mrs Porter, was also the cook, but regularly burnt both the breakfast porridge and the barley soup she was given to producing as the main source of sustenance in the evening. An old boy of the school, occupying an attic at the top of a flight of uncarpeted stairs that led out of one of the dormitories, was the junior master, but he appeared to have acquired neither privilege nor distinction through that role: he, too, sat by the radiator in the classroom and dreaded the cooking of Mrs Porter. The bachelor headmaster, a boxer in his time – reputed to have been known in ringside circles as the Belted Earl, an obscurely acquired sobriquet that had remained with him – was a Savonarola-like figure in a green suit, sadistically inclined.
‘Oh, I quite liked the place,’ Lairdman said.
‘You were a day boy.’
‘I suppose it made a difference.’
‘Of course it did.’
For the first time Boland felt annoyed. Not only was the man she’d become involved with mean, he was stupid as well. All this stuff about an address in England, all this stuff about giving up a seven-room flat, when if he had an iota of common sense he’d realize you didn’t go buying houses for the likes of Annabella because in no way whatsoever could you rely on her doing what she said she was going to do.
‘I’ve always thought, actually, it supplied a sound education,’ Lairdman was saying.
The awful little Frenchman who couldn’t make himself understood. O’Reilly-Flood, whose method of teaching history was to give the class the textbook to read while he wrote letters. The mathematics man who couldn’t solve the problems he set. The Belted Earl in his foul laboratory, prodding at your ears with the sharp end of a tweezers until you cried out in pain.
‘Oh, a great place,’ Boland agreed. ‘A fine academy.’
‘We’d probably send our children there. If we have boys.’
‘Your children?’
‘You’d have no objection? Lord no, why should you? I’m sorry, that’s a silly thing to say.’
‘I’ll have another,’ Boland requested of the barman. ‘How about your mineral?’
‘No, I’m OK, thanks.’
This time he did not mention, even too late, that he should pay. Instead he looked away, as if wishing to dissociate himself from an over-indulgence in whiskey on an occasion such as this, before it was yet midday. Boland lit another cigarette. So she hadn’t told him? She’d let this poor devil imagine that in no time at all the seven-room flat in Wellington Road wouldn’t be spacious enough to contain the family that would naturally come trotting along once she’d rid herself of her provincial husband. Of course there’d have to be a divorce, and of course it would have to be hurried up: no one wanted a litter of little bastards in a seven-room flat or anywhere else.
‘Good man, yourself,’ he said to the barman when his whiskey came. If he ended up having too much to drink, as indeed might happen, he’d spend the night in the hotel rather than drive back. But it was early yet, and it was surprising what a heavy lunch could do.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Lairdman repeated, referring again to his slip of the tongue. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Ah, for heaven’s sake, man!’
Boland briefly touched him, a reassuring tap on the shoulder. He could hear her telling him that the reason for their childless marriage had long ago been established. ‘Poor old fellow,’ she’d probably said, that being her kind of expression. She’d known before their marriage that she couldn’t have children; in a quarrel long after it she’d confessed that she’d known and hadn’t said.
‘Naturally,’ Lairdman blandly continued, ‘we’d like to have a family.’
‘You would of course.’
‘I’m sorry that side of things didn’t go right for you.’
