did not accompany his sisters to the sea-front and the Yew Tree Cafe, presenting them with the unlikely excuse that he had some history to read. He watched them set off from the window of his bedroom, delayed another twenty minutes, and then went slowly downstairs. He paused again, in doubt and trepidation, before he found the courage to knock on his father’s study door. He had no idea how he might express himself.
‘Yes?’ the Headmaster responded.
Jonathan closed the door behind him. The study smelt, as always, of his father’s pipe tobacco and a mustiness that could not be identified. Glasspaned cupboards were full of textbooks, There were supplies of chalk and geometrical instruments, globes of the world, cartridges for fountain pens, stacks of new exercise-books, blotting paper, pencils. His father sat behind his desk, a pipe in his mouth, the new term’s timetables spread out before him.
‘Well, old chap? Come to lend a hand?’
Beyond the geniality lay the ghost of the Headmaster’s termtime self, of severity and suspicion. Pomposity wasn’t what mattered most; talk of ‘Older values’ and ‘bad taste’ was only tedious on its own. ‘Bloody hypocrite’, some boy – neither Tottle nor Piercey – had said once. ‘Nasty brute’.
‘Always tricky, the summer timetables.’
Jonathan nodded.
‘Cricket’s greedy,’ the Headmaster said. ‘Where time’s concerned.’
‘Yes, it is.’
His father knocked the ashes out of his pipe and drew a tin of tobacco towards him. All his life, Jonathan had been familiar with these
‘Girls out somewhere?’ his father said.
‘I think so.’
A match was struck, the tobacco caught. Jonathan watched it reddening, and smoke streaming from between his father’s tightly clenched teeth. There was no conversation they could have. He could not mention the voices in the darkness of the dormitory, the confessions of desire, the declarations of intention. He could not tell his father he was despised for being the person he was, that boys were sorry for a woman they likened to a hen. He could not warn him of Tottle’s revenge, nor suggest what lay ahead for Georgina and Harriet. Lying awake the night before, he had wanted to protect his sisters, and his mother also, because they were not to blame. And in a way he had even wanted to protect his father because he didn’t know enough, because he blustered and was oppressive, and went about things stupidly.
‘Well, I’d best get on, old chap,’ his father said, applying himself once more to the sheets of paper that constituted the summer timetables. The balding head was bent again. Smoke eddied about it complacently.
Jonathan went away, softly closing the study door behind him. He ran through the empty corridors of the school, and down the hydrangea drive. He ran along the sea-front, looking for his sisters.
‘I’m after a field of land, sir.’
Hagerty’s tone was modest to the bank agent, careful and cautious. He was aware that Mr Ensor would know what was coming next. He was aware that he constituted a risk, a word Mr Ensor had used a couple of times when endeavouring to discuss the overdraft Hagerty already had with the bank.
‘I was wondering, sir…’ His voice trailed away when Mr Ensor’s head began to shake. He’d like to say yes, the bank agent assured him. He would say yes this very instant, only what use would it be when Head Office wouldn’t agree? They’re bad times, Mr Hagerty.’
It was a Monday morning in 1948. Leaning on the counter, his right hand still grasping the stick he’d used to drive three bullocks the seven miles from his farm, Hagerty agreed that the times were as bad as ever he’d known them. He’d brought the bullocks in to see if he could get a price for them, but he hadn’t been successful. All the way on his journey he’d been thinking about the field old Lally had spent his lifetime carting the rocks out of. The widow the old man had left behind had sold the nineteen acres on the other side of the hill, but the last of her fields was awkwardly placed for anyone except Hagerty. They both knew it would be convenient for him to have it; they both knew there’d be almost as much profit in that single pasture as there was in all the land he possessed already. Gently sloping, naturally drained, it was free of weeds and thistles, and the grass it grew would do you good to look at. Old Lally had known its value from the moment he’d inherited it. He had kept it ditched, with its gates and stone walls always cared for. And for miles around, no one had ever cleared away rocks like old Lally had.
‘I’d help you if I could, Mr Hagerty,’ the bank agent assured him. ‘Only there’s still a fair bit owing.’
‘I know there is, sir.’
Every December Hagerty walked into the bank with a plucked turkey as a seasonal statement of gratitude: the overdraft had undramatically continued for seventeen years. It was less than it had been, but Hagerty was no longer young and he might yet be written off as a bad debt. He hadn’t had much hope when he’d raised the subject of the field he coveted.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Hagerty,’ the bank agent said, stretching his hand across the width of the counter. ‘I know that field well. I know you could make something of it, but there you are.’
‘Ah well, you gave it your consideration, sir.’
He said it because it was his way to make matters easier for a man who had lent him money in the past: Hagerty was a humble man. He had a tired look about him, his spare figure stooped from the shoulders, a black hat always on his head. He hadn’t removed it in the bank, nor did he in Shaughnessy’s Provisions and Bar, where he sat in a corner by himself, with a bottle of stout to console him. He had left the bullocks in Cronin’s yard in order to free himself for his business in the bank, and since Cronin made a small charge for this fair-day service he’d thought he might as well take full advantage of it by delaying a little longer.
He reflected as he drank that he hardly needed the bank agent’s reminder about the times being bad. Seven
