The New Confessions Page 8

  In the spring of 1916 I asked her for a photograph. It required some courage, and until it arrived, I was in a constant sweat of trepidation that I had gone too far. But it came, a snapshot. Faye, in the country, leaning on a five-barred gate, her curly hair in a loose bun, her smudged, debauched eyes narrowed by her smile. One hand held the top of a dog’s leash and the other the knuckly end of a blackthorn walking stick. On the back she had scribbled, “Shipton-Under-Wychwood. March ’16.” Who had taken it? I wondered. Probably Peter, her son. It was too well composed to be little Gilda’s or Alceste’s work. I opened the accompanying letter and began to read.

  Dear John,

  Photograph duly enclosed; I hope you like it. Donald took it for me. He comes down most weekends from London. I cannot tell you what a support and kindness he has been since Vincent died. He is sorting out all the dreary problems to do with the will and estate. He sends his best wishes.

  There was more stuff about Donald, sweet Donald, but I could not read on. I felt as if I were about to burst into tears. I experienced a sense of such towering injustice that I could hardly speak. What gave Donald Verulam the right, I demanded, to occupy a place in my aunt Faye’s good favor? For what possible reason could he have taken on these responsibilities? On what conceivable grounds did he ingratiate himself with a member of my family, whom he hardly knew? I was outraged, brimming with hurt and disappointment. I, who could only write to her, had to accept that Faye’s life was not centered on my weekly letters as mine was on hers. I was in the grip of an irrational jealously so intense it made me want to vomit.

  We like to laugh, do we not, at the baroque passions of high adolescence, but we cannot deny that they control and guide us during those few hot palpitating years. It is an unsettling, overwhelming power and one that most people will never feel so vehemently again, indeed, will never want to be so ruthlessly led by. Adult life, if it is to function at all, demands a moderation of these extremes. From time to time, however, they break out—lava cracking the pumice—and dominate with the same rampaging potency. What is lust, adult lust, after all, but the desire to recapture the heady sensations of adolescent sexuality?

  Personally, I have never lost that youthful capacity to feel, in its raw vital state. Thank God. This is what sets me apart from the many, hamstrung by decorum and convention, stifled by notions of respect and status. Even today, I can reexperience my seventeen-year-old jealousy, feel its grip at my throat, its claw in my guts. It was unfocused and indiscriminate. I did not see Donald Verulam as a rival, more as an interloper, destroying an ideal duality. But it would not let me go. I could not forget my love for Faye, could think only that he was there with her, and I was apart. One idea came to dominate my thoughts: I had to see her, if only for a few hours. I had to run away.

  “What do you expect’s going to happen?” Hamish asked unsympathetically, when I told him my plan. “Do you think she’ll want to marry you the instant she claps eyes on you?” This was what I did not want to hear. I knew he was right. Faye Hobhouse, attractive widow, was being comforted through her period of mourning by Donald Verulam. They were two adults. I was a seventeen-year-old boy. But a darker fear, a more profound dismay tugged at me, unarticulated. All I knew was that I had to see her, present myself to her as I now was, erase the image of the child she had kissed at Waverley Station. I tried to make Hamish see this.

  “But then what?”

  I did not know and confessed as much. All I knew was that I had to interpose myself between Faye and Donald Verulam. I had to see her and let her see me.

  Hamish agreed to help, even though he thought I was a complete fool. In fact I think he admired my single-mindedness, however crazily motivated. We made plans for my escape. We pooled our financial resources, which proved more than adequate. The subterfuge was simple. Before dinner on Sunday there was a roll call, as there was at every meal. After dinner I would cycle not to Galashiels or Thornielee but in the other direction to more distant Innerleithen. There I would buy a ticket to London and board a 10:30 train, which, after a couple of changes, would get me to Reston, arriving there in plenty of time to meet the 11:55 overnight express from Edinburgh to London, King’s Cross. I chose Innerleithen to forestall for as long as possible any information emerging about my destination. People buying tickets to London were rare enough events as it was on that Tweed Valley branch line. I would be easily remembered. Minto would send Angus to Thornielee and Galashiels as soon as my absence was discovered. I might get a day or two’s start before they thought of asking further up or down the line.

  There lay between us the unspoken knowledge that Hamish would become implicated. He would do his best to cover up my absence in the dormitory. A simple lie—that I had been taken ill and put to bed in the small sanitorium upstairs—would be sufficient. Our dormitory leader, a simple lad called Corcoran, would think nothing untoward, especially if Hamish made the pretense of taking my toothbrush and pajamas upstairs. Such complicity would inevitably result in a flogging from Minto. As we discussed the details of the escape (where to hide a bicycle, where to get enough carbide for the lamp—it was a fourteen-mile journey to Innerleithen), I became more upset at the price Hamish would have to pay.

  “He’ll flog you,” I blurted out.

  “Bound to happen one day.”

  “Look, just promise me, don’t let him flog you twice. Tell him everything straightaway.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not that brave.”

  I wanted to touch him in some way—show my immense gratitude—but I knew it was out of the question.

  “I won’t forget this, Malahide,” I said, my voice cracking slightly.

  “You helped me once,” he said. “Just paying you back.”

  A fortnight after Faye had sent me her photograph, I left school to join her. It was May 24, 1916. That night for dinner we had mutton broth and rabbit and onions. Hamish gave me most of his portion. After dinner we had an hour of free time before we were required to be in the schoolhouse. Lights-out was at 9 P.M.

  Hamish and I met by the side of the stable block and walked through the small wood, past the art rooms, and on to a spinney of trees where we had hidden the bicycle. It was a fresh cool evening with high, heavy cloud. There was a smell of honey in the air from the sycamores and a circling wood lark whispered high above us. A dull, bluey light lay over everything.

  I was going to cycle along a dirt track that led to the home farm, skirt that and its noisy dogs on foot, then freewheel down the steep lane that led to the Galashiels-Innerleithen road. If all went well I should arrive at the station just after ten. The one obstacle we had not managed to overcome was my apparel. I still wore my kilt (hunting Stewart) and my short coat. We arrived at school in our uniforms and departed thus: our own clothes were forbidden. I was by now quite unselfconscious in my kilt, but for the first time in my life was leaving Scotland for England. Somehow, the thought of being kilted in London unsettled me. But there was nothing to be done. I had a long overcoat and with a bit of luck anyone catching sight of my stockinged legs beneath it might think I was wearing plus fours.

  I pulled the bicycle out from a clump of bracken. We debated whether to ignite the carbide, but I decided to wait until it got darker. I felt a sudden foreboding: my reason belatedly asserting itself. Fool, it seemed to say, abandon this mad idea.… But it was too late now.

  “You’d better get going,” Hamish said. “Good luck.”

  “Right,” I said. I got on the bicycle. “Now, remember—”

  “On you go.” He grinned, showing his large teeth. I felt hot-eyed with inarticulate gratitude. He gave me a shove, and I bumped off down the track towards the home farm. I would not see him again for three years.

  Everything went as planned, at least on my side. The ride to Innerleithen was actually quite entrancing. The road followed the Tweed, and to my excited eyes the slow river and its fragrant meadows grew ever more hauntingly beautiful in the darkening, dusky light. I bought my ticket to
London, one way, third class, price one pound fifteen shillings, and made my connection successfully at Reston.

  Sometime after midnight, sharing a smoky, blurry compartment with two sailors and someone who looked like a commercial traveler, I crossed the border into England. I left Scotland behind me and along with it my youth. Even at the time it seemed epochal enough. I knew somehow that nothing would be the same after this particular adventure. I did not think of the future, of my meeting with Faye. I was happy in the present moment, and there was nothing in my past, I felt, to make me want to cherish it. I hunched into my overcoat collar and tried to go to sleep. It took me an hour or so to achieve it. The sailors talked (they were rejoining a dreadnought in Southampton) and drank something from a bottle. The commercial traveler tried to engage me in conversation, but my taciturnity proved too much for him. I looked out at the dark countryside and tried to memorize, as if taking a talismanic inventory, the strange names of the stations we flashed past—Pegswood, Morpeth, Croft and Northallerton—as we traveled down England.

  I recount the following events exactly as I recall them happening. I make no excuses for myself or my bizarre behavior. I was seventeen. Please remember.

  The sun shone in London. I was astonished at how much warmer it was than Scotland. I felt I had entered another climate. I was not overawed by the city; if anything, the traffic in Edinburgh seemed heavier, though here the noise was more concentrated and the streets were distinctly less clean. I took an underground train from King’s Cross to Paddington. My kilt drew few curious glances. I realized at Paddington, where I saw a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry disembarking, that kilts had become reasonably commonplace south of the border since 1914.

  But on the train to Charlbury my neutral composure began to desert me. I looked out of the window at the bland and innocuous countryside and told myself to calm down. Faye would be surprised but glad to see me, I reassured myself. Everything would be fine.

  At Charlbury Station I secured directions to the Hobhouses’ address from a cabby. I walked up the hill through the small town, its dullocher buildings looking quite peculiar to me, I recall. It was just after luncheon and the shops were being reopened. I had not eaten since the evening before and, as I passed a baker’s, almost swooned from hunger. I bought a slice of veal and ham pie and checked I was going in the right direction. Everyone appeared to know where Vincent Hobhouse had lived.

  I walked on up through the town eating my pie. It was too warm for my overcoat. I took it off. The sky was milky, the sun invisible. The dust on the verge was white. My heavy boots crunched on the gravel of the unpaved road. At one point two small barefoot urchins chased after me, laughing at my kilt and shouting insults at me in their incomprehensible dialect. I shied a couple of stones at them and they ran away.

  The Hobhouse home was a large, solid, late-Georgian building set on a hill overlooking the town and the Windrush Valley. It had a spacious garden with many mature trees—a gloomy cedar, two monkey puzzles, elms and limes—and was surrounded by a tall beech hedge. Further down the hill was a small nursing home, past which I walked, and beyond it a row of cottages. The house was set back from what I later learned was the Oxford road, and beyond it lay open fields and countryside.

  I walked up the drive. Two lolloping spaniels, followed by a little girl in a sailor suit, ran to intercept me. I stopped. I felt myself perceptibly weaken. I was suddenly appalled by the full audacity of what I had done.

  “Hello,” I said, with fake bonhomie. “Is your mother in?… You must be Alceste.”

  “I’m Gilda. This is Ned and this is Ted.” She introduced the dogs. “My father’s gone to heaven.”

  I felt sick. “I know. I’m your cousin. John James Todd. Come to see you.”

  Gilda took me indoors. We went through an entrance hall and an inner hall. I was left in a cool pale drawing room, heavy with the scent of potpourri and encumbered with the ornaments and collectibles of long inhabitation. On a round table was a group of leather- and tortoiseshell-framed photographs. I saw my mother’s face. I closed my eyes.

  “Johnny?”

  I turned round, blood booming like surf in my ears. Faye. I felt my stomach rotate with stupid love. She wore a green apron over her dress and I found myself wondering—absurdly—if she had been cleaning silver. Her hair was tied loosely at the back with a velvet bow. She looked younger even than her photograph. I felt like laughing. I had never seen anyone more beautiful. Instantly, all my doubts disappeared. I had done the right thing.

  “What are you doing here?” Her tone was puzzled. Her eyes took in my kilt, my socks, my boots. All my doubts returned. I had made a ghastly mistake.

  “I’ve run away from school.”

  “But why?”

  Because I love you, I wanted to shout.

  “Because … I want to join the army.”

  * * *

  What in God’s good name made me say that? What malign fate put those words in my mouth? If I had only told the truth, think what I would have avoided. I am not sure how the subconscious mind works but this was no long-repressed ambition; nothing could have been further from my wishes. After the first flush of war fever, Minto Academy’s aggressive instincts had faded rapidly, partly as a result of waning interest, partly encouraged by Minto’s passionate neutrality. Every old Mintonian who died prompted another melancholy panegyric in favor of peace. Tones of “I told you so” seemed to hang in the air for days after every futile battle. By the end of 1915 everyone’s enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I must have blurted out my “reason” as a consequence of an instinctive association of ideas. My embarrassment. Faye’s eyes on my kilt, the Highland Light Infantry at Paddington—ergo, soldiering.

  At first, as it turned out, it did its job admirably. All Faye’s suspicions and surprise were allayed. To my vague disappointment she did not try to dissuade me. She reminded me I was too young, but perhaps I could join up next year. Possibly, her zeal arose from the fact that I was her nephew and not her son. In fact she told me that Peter had volunteered immediately on leaving school in the summer of 1915 and he had joined a public school battalion. Faye thought this might be just the place for me. Peter would be able to supply all the right information and advice—might even get me into the same battalion. I found myself agreeing with diminishing enthusiasm. Peter, it transpired, was coming home on leave that very weekend, I should wait in Charlbury at least until then, Faye counseled, when I could ask him anything I wanted.

  Four days. Four days alone with Faye (if one excluded the servants and Gilda and Alceste). I experienced a temporary relief. Problems and decisions could be postponed for a while. I was here, I was with her, living under the same roof. That had been the immediate aim of my running away and I had achieved it. I allowed myself to sink into the warm pool of her welcome.

  The first thing Faye did was to telegram my father and the school. I felt curiously invulnerable and only wondered vaguely how Minto would react upon receipt of the news. I did not reflect too long on my father’s response, either. I was here in England; they seemed a continent away. This was, I now realize, the first indication of a dangerous tendency in my character: the long view, the long term, rarely attracts me. It is the here and now I find alluring. When I act it is because I am impelled by something irresistible within me and seldom as a result of some well-plotted strategy. This happened again and again in my life and usually brought swift satisfaction followed by disastrous remorse. Suppose I had stayed out my course at the Academy and completed my certificate exams? Who knows what would have happened?… But this is futile. How we live reflects our own natures. The prudent, cautious, sensible approach would never be the one I chose.

  So here I was in the large comfortable house. Did Faye ask herself why, if I wished to join the army, I had to run away to Charlbury to do so? She must have. But she would forgive me anything, Faye, as I was the son of her beloved, late sister, motherless since the day of his birth, bereft of a maternal guiding ha
nd and illimitable source of love. It was only natural in such a confused moment that I should turn somewhere for solace and advice. (In fact this was the first question her son, Peter, asked me. I told him I had originally planned to enlist in London, as far away from my father’s influence as possible. A sudden failure of nerve had drawn me to Charlbury. He understood completely.)

  I was served up a late lunch that day (to supplement my veal and ham pie) of cold meat, bread and pickle, and then Faye called the gardener (I cannot recall his name—an old man with a limp) to drive us in the family motor to Oxford to buy some clothes for me (a light flannel suit, two shirts, collars, a tie and, my suggestion this, a flat tweed cap). Faye took a real pleasure in our jaunt. It was a mild, hazy day. The drive to and from Oxford was taken up with a chatter of reminiscence. I am sure too that Faye secretly rather admired my resolve. When you meet people like myself who act foolhardily or spontaneously it is easy, from a haven of routine and security, to mock or deplore us. But at the same time, in your heart, there is a profound and unsettling envy of the freedom that is expressed in our careless actions. And Faye, I thought that day, was in fact rather like me. We shared the same spirit, but she had confined hers to a life of provincial worthiness when she married Vincent Hobhouse. I sensed too that, after the grief and mourning an invigorating suspense and ignorance had begun to pervade her life. What now? Where next? With whom?

  Two terse telegrams arrived early that evening to undermine my intoxicated mood. Minto’s forbade me to return to the Academy and instructed me to consider myself expelled. My father’s simply ordered me to come home at once. Faye advised me to ignore this last injunction. She felt that nothing would be gained by turning round and heading back so swiftly. She suggested I write explaining my motives in more detail and she would enclose a letter saying words to the effect that I was confused and upset and a few days’ unofficial holiday in Charlbury would be highly beneficial. The letters were written, sealed, stamped and taken down to the postbox. At the very least, Faye said, we had a week’s grace.