Engleby Read online

  Jen-Jen xxx

  There was one bit in Jennifer’s letter I really didn’t like, and I expect you can guess what it was. What I really didn’t like was: (!)

  Not even a word. A single vertical line and a dot, parenthesised.

  For the rest, I quite enjoyed it. Of course, like all students she was giving only an edited account of what was going on. No mention of drugs, or cigarettes, for instance – or sex.

  Duplicitous, you might call her. Tactful would probably be her own word.

  You couldn’t help but warm to her father, though, could you? I pictured him a bit like Mr Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. (‘Which reminds me, Dr Stanley, may I offer you four pages on “Mixed Motives for Marriage in the Novels of Jane Austen”? No? Are you quite sure?’)

  I put Jen’s letter away in the third drawer of my desk and locked it.

  Yes, Mr Arkland sounded nice. Did Jen have sisters, then, I wondered? If he was really a Mr Bennett type, then she must have. And he was MA, which meant that he had either done postgraduate work at an ordinary university or been to one of the ancient ones and paid five guineas to convert his B to an M.

  If the latter, he must be quite grand, because in his generation you got admitted not by competitive exam but only if you could pay the fees. They didn’t have grants in those days. Their address sounded modest enough, but now I came to think of it, Jennifer is what you’d call ‘well spoken’ – not stuck-up, and with plenty of student ‘yeah’s and ‘like’s, but not common. Not like me. She’s got a lovely voice, in fact. It sounds as though she’s always trying to suppress laughter out of consideration for the person she’s talking to. You want to tell her it’s all right, you don’t have to be polite, you can let go and laugh.

  The other striking thing about Mr Bennett, I mean Mr Arkland, the thing that really stirred me in the guts, is that he’s alive – and probably only fifty-odd.

  My own father died when I was twelve. I can’t pretend we were surprised, obviously. I was looking after Julie one afternoon. She used to go to a free nursery in the morning, then my mother would drop her with the Callaghans or someone while she went back to the hotel and I’d pick Julie up on the way home from school.

  I’d started at the grammar school, having done well in the eleven-plus despite going to a desperate catch-all primary called St Bede’s. The good thing about St B’s was that no one bothered you. There was no homework to speak of and you could wander from one room to another and see what lesson you liked the look of. I think it was a county council ‘initiative’ or something. I went mostly to science or history, but one girl I knew spent five years in the craft room. (I believe she has her own design company in London now.) At St B’s you never got asked home by anyone because most of their mothers worked and didn’t want a stranger there. In my year at least five fathers were ‘away’ (i.e. inside) and the majority didn’t live with the mother any more; we, the nuclear Englebys, were considered odd.

  At the grammar school, though, there was a different kind of boy. All the parents were married. Some of the fathers did things like dentistry; one was a ‘solicitor’, according to his son. I found it difficult to find much in common with these boys, though I liked the look of their new satchels and their racing bikes.

  My bus stop was only ten minutes’ walk from the Callaghans’ and I banged on the door, holding my breath against the stagnant, stuffy smell when one of the twins opened it. Why do poor people’s houses always smell like that? Ours did, too, and I thought all houses did till I went to a reception for my year at the grammar school headmaster’s house and it smelt of – I don’t know, air and wood or something.

  Julie came skipping out and took my hand and we set off down Trafalgar Terrace as we always did, past the sooty red brick and the small windows with china ornaments, brass pots and grey net curtains. I make it sound slummy, but actually I like weathered English red brick and it was all right. Take it from me, it was not too bad. Once we were home, I made a pot of tea and some toast and honey for both of us, then I sat Julie down in front of Crackerjack on the snowy monochrome Rediffusion TV and went to do my homework in the kitchen.

  I heard the telephone ring and went to answer it.

  ‘Mike. Thank God you’re there. It’s your dad. He’s been taken poorly. He’s in Battle hospital. You’d better come over. Take some money from the pot on the kitchen mantelpiece. Ask for Lister Ward.’

  ‘What about Julie?’

  ‘You’ll have to bring her.’

  Everyone knew where Battle hospital was, it was famous, but it took two buses and a fifteen-minute hike to get there. I carried Julie on my shoulders for the last bit. The reception area had that grey aspect I’d seen through the windows of the old men’s workhouse. We were directed down a long stone corridor, on which there were periodically signs to Lister, among the other notices – X-ray, Pathology, Mother and Child Unit, Rowntree Cancer Ward.

  We found ourselves going through half-glassed swing doors and out into a courtyard with parked ambulances and dustbins. It was raining slightly and Julie was tugging at me, asking me to slow down. On the other side were more hospital buildings, low-built, more modern than the giant Victorian building we’d come through, but somehow already tinged with that same grey, as though prematurely aged by all the deaths they had housed and shipped on and forgotten.

  Eventually we found Lister, an airless room with strip lights, full of screens and half-drawn curtains with old people lying flat, looking as though they were on their way out. There was a television showing an early evening news bulletin. I eventually made out my mother, sitting on the end of a bed near the window. She turned round when we approached, but didn’t say anything. She was wearing a headscarf and still had her overcoat on. She raised a finger to her lips. My father was lying on his back with a tube up his nose and a drip attached to his arm. His eyes were closed and his jaw had fallen. His skin was ashy-grey and there was short white stubble showing on his chin; someone had taken out his false teeth. His pyjama jacket was open and there were wires attached with pads to his bony, hairless chest. I thought of his heart, a fat muscle that had always shirked the job.

  I tried to think back to when he’d been younger – healthier. There must have been memories – of the seaside, or of him playing football with me in the park, or carrying me on his shoulders or helping to decorate the Christmas tree. There weren’t. All I could remember was waiting for him at the side door of the paper mill on a Friday afternoon when he came out with his grey envelope. ‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘Another week. Make sure you never end up here, Mike.’

  I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I’ll make sure I never end up here, either.

  In one way, Dad’s death was the making of me, and that way was the academic. At the funeral, the vicar took me strongly by the arms and looked me in the eye.

  ‘You may feel alone, but you’re not.’

  I waited for the God-loves-you thing.

  ‘Others have been where you are. I have stood where you stand today. You will survive, however stricken you now feel.’

  I pulled my arm away because I didn’t want to hear this. I actually needed to feel I was alone. Why did I need the grief of others? Wasn’t mine enough? Why did I need to feel that this abandonment was plural, when it was heavy enough singular? The best way ahead that I could see was to drag this thing off and digest it on my own, like a python with an outsize kill.

  Since we didn’t have the kind of house you could ask people back to, the vicar invited the mourners to the rectory. There were some people from the paper mill, a supervisor, a manager, a couple of workmates, some aunts, uncles and neighbours, about three dozen in all, a respectable number. The vicar’s charlady served fish paste and Sandwich Spread sandwiches and tea and fruit cake and sherry if you wanted it.

  The vicar wouldn’t leave me alone. ‘I g
ather you’re at the grammar school,’ he said.

  All the guests had now stopped being mournful and were making general chat, as though nothing had happened. I kept thinking of the damp earth on my father’s coffin, wondering how soon he would decompose. Did they put an accelerator pack in there, a chemical to kick-start the process, as you might with a compost heap? Was he clothed in there?

  ‘Have you thought of Chatfield?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The naval school. I gather from the eulogy that your father was in the Royal Navy in the War and served throughout. You might be eligible for a scholarship to Chatfield. I’m a visiting chaplain. It’s worth considering, especially if you’re not settled at the grammar school. I shall have a word with your mother.’

  I didn’t mind the grammar school, but nevertheless in March I did some exams in an unused room, invigilated by Miss Penrose, the art teacher. These were the scholarship papers for Chatfield, a ‘public’, i.e. private, school about an hour’s drive away. It was a famous institution, founded by some naval bigwig for the sons of sailors killed in battle, which had grown to take in ‘ordinary’ boys as well; in fact, I had the impression it was pretty keen to find pupils of any description who could pay the hefty fees.

  Which we couldn’t. But the top award, the Romney Open, paid the lot for you. I had had a crash course in Latin, which I’d never done before, working evenings with Mr Briggs from the grammar school, who volunteered his services. I struggled with the prose paper, though the unseen translation from Latin into English was straightforward (a poem by Catullus and a bit of prose where I already knew the story). The other papers were easy. I was called for an interview with the headmaster, which we took to be a good sign.

  It turned out my father had died just in time. They sent a letter to the grammar school and one to us at home saying they were offering me the Romney Open, the full fees, all expenses paid, to start in September, when I would be thirteen and a half. They sincerely hoped I would take up the place as the rest of the candidates had been retards.

  No, they didn’t say that, but behind all the posturing and telling us just how old and honourable and important they were – and how incredibly fortunate I was – I did sense a whiff of desperation.

  Why should that be? I wondered.

  Three

  I walked up from the station to the outer gates, which gave on to a tarmac drive about half a mile long, fringed with dripping evergreens. Eventually, I came to the main building and asked a man in the lodge where I was meant to go.

  ‘Which house you in?’

  ‘Collingham.’

  ‘New man, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go to the corner of the quad, through that door. It’s new men’s tea with the housemaster. You’re late.’

  I went where he pointed, and knocked. The door was opened by a grey-haired man in a black gown.

  ‘You must be Engleby. You’d better meet the others.’

  Three boys in tweed jackets and flannel trousers were hunched round a low table with teacups. I knew from a letter that the housemaster was called Talbot. There was a fair boy with glasses called Francis, a dark one called McCain and a third one with a black eye called Batley.

  Mr Talbot explained that I’d lost my father and was on the Romney Open; the others looked at me fearfully. Batley lived on a farm in Yorkshire without electric light or running water; Mr Talbot seemed to like the sound of this, though I couldn’t see what was so great about it. Even in Trafalgar Terrace we had these things. I mean, even the Callaghans have electricity. Batley had scored 44 per cent in the entrance exam, though merely turning up and writing down your name got you thirty. Again, this didn’t seem to be a problem for Mr Talbot – rather the opposite. Batley seemed to have what Chatfield wanted. (The other two boys, McCain and Francis, had no distinguishing features.)

  We went out into the quad and over to a stone staircase with iron bannisters. Talbot led us up two floors to some tall, battered double doors and pushed them open. And there was Collingham, ‘my’ house.

  It was a single wide corridor with cubicles. Metal shaded lights hung at intervals from the ceiling. The paintwork was battered and kicked, but predominantly green. We walked past maybe twenty-five doors on either side till we reached the end. Our names were printed on metal strips above the door. Mine was the last room on the left. Inside was an iron bedstead, a table, hard chair and a small chest of drawers. A window gave on to a flat roof, which led over other pitched roofs to the main bell tower. The partition with the next cubicle was wooden, but my other wall, being the end of the building, was just unpainted brick.

  ‘Your fagmasters will come and see you and make sure you know the drill,’ said Mr Talbot. ‘Tea’s at six in Troughton’s. Any questions?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Do you know where my stuff is? My clothes and things?’

  ‘Didn’t your people bring you? No, of course, you don’t have a car, do you? If it came by train it’ll be sent up from the station to the lodge. You’d better go and fetch it. Don’t be late for tea.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the porter—’

  ‘I’m afraid they’re not that sort of porter.’

  Francis and McCain laughed nervously along with Mr Talbot; Batley looked confused.

  I lugged my trunk over the front quad and up the stairs; the boys going up and down swore at me for being in the way. When I pulled it into Collingham, an older boy, perhaps a ‘prefect’, told me to lift it up and not drag it on the wooden floor.

  ‘It’s too heavy.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to unpack it here and carry the stuff to your room till it’s lighter, won’t you?’ He spoke as though explaining something obvious to an idiot.

  As I carried down the corridor the armfuls of grey shirts, football socks and vests my mother had got from the school second-hand shop, some boys took them from my arms and threw them over the partitions into random cubicles.

  My ‘fagmaster’ was a small, nervous boy called Ridgeway. ‘If you hear a prefect call “Fag”,’ he said, ‘run like hell. The last one there does the job. There’s a fag test in two weeks’ time. You need to know all the initials of all the masters, all the school offices, like who’s captain of fives, all the rules and all the school geography. Read these.’ He put the rule book, the annual calendar and ‘call list’ on my table.

  ‘Where’s Troughton’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Down Dock Walk, behind Greville.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Keep your head down. Don’t speak. Don’t be nervy.’

  ‘Nervy?’

  ‘Pushy. Don’t show off. Be invisible.’

  ‘Thank you, Ridgeway.’

  I had spent a week in Bexhill once, but apart from that had never slept outside my parents’ house, so I was interested to know how it would feel. I didn’t know where I was meant to go to clean my teeth or what time I was meant to turn my light out, so I brushed them in the room and spat out of the window. I turned the light off early, wondering if Batley had yet figured out what the metal switch inside the door was for.

  I can’t remember much of the first few days. I think I expected that at some time someone would explain what it was all about, but gradually it became clear that not explaining was the Chatfield way. It was a sign of weakness to ask a question; ‘initiative’ was shown by not making a fuss. You were meant to know what to do. How? Instinct? Tarot? Sortilege? No, just by being a good crew member, by not making a fuss, by just knowing.

  ‘Keep your head down.’ It was Ridgeway’s hunted look more than his actual words that stayed with me.

  Being the holder of the Romney Open meant that I was placed in classes with boys a year or two older. They responded to my impertinence by not talking to me – ever. Not in all the time I was at that school.

  The lessons were given by masters who all looked alike. They wore black gowns over tweed jackets and baggy grey trousers; they had lace-up tan shoes with enormous welts, so they rol
led along the cloisters as though on brown tyres. They all had flat grey hair and similar, one-word nicknames – ‘stalky’ Read, ‘Mug’ Benson, ‘Tubby’ Lyneham, ‘Bingo’ Maxwell; it was hard to tell them apart, to feel anything for them or about them, and this indifference was reciprocated.

  Stalky Read did have a particular phrase of his own, now I come to think of it: ‘Take the first bus to the Prewett.’ What the hell did that mean? Park Prewett, it was eventually explained to me, was a famous loony bin, near Basingstoke. If you made an elementary mistake in geography, Stalky’s advice never varied: ‘First bus to the Prewett. Leaves at two.’

  When I was returning to my cubicle after lessons on perhaps my third day at Chatfield, I found that two-thirds of the way down the corridor, barring my path, stood a large boy, about seventeen, with his hands stuck in his belt. He glared at me as I got close, his face set in a sneer. I couldn’t take cover in any of the rooms en route because I didn’t know any of the boys in them. When eventually I reached him, he sidestepped to prevent me passing. I tried the other side, but he moved across to block the way. I looked up at him to see what he wanted. He was about two feet taller than me and had the features I’d already noticed were common at Chatfield: a mask of erupting spots and damp-looking hair. He didn’t really seem to have hair, in fact, but something more like a pint of oil poured over his scalp and divided into shiny hanks; his complexion looked as though a carton of raspberry yoghurt had exploded in his face. Eventually he let me pass, kicking me in the coccyx as I went. His name, I was told, was Baynes, J.T.

  He had two friends called Wingate and Hood. They told me they’d ‘noticed’ me. I was ‘nervy’, that was my trouble, wasn’t it?

  When I got back that afternoon after football, my sheets were soaking wet and all my clothes had been strewn round the room. I slept on the mattress that night, but the next day it, too, was soaked in water, so I lay down on the springs.

  In the main corridor of Collingham there was a table where bread and margarine was sent up twice a day in plastic dustbins. The margarine was wholesale grade, stamped on the wrapper ‘not for retail distribution’, and often got smeared over the wall and floor, where it mixed with Marmite and golden syrup. A paper bag full of crystals was sent up in the dustbin with it; the idea was that if you mixed them with water, they made some sort of fizzy drink, though I never saw anyone try it. One of my jobs was to clean this area, and for this I was given a cloth that had been used to soak up milk. It was difficult to do more than smear the slick into new positions, while trying not to gag from the smell of the cloth.