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  An Open Prison

  First published in 1984

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1984-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755130464 9780755130467 Print

  0755133315 9780755133314 Kindle

  0755133625 9780755133628 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.

  In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.

  J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

  I

  I had spent eight months in America, most of them teaching on an exchange basis at a preparatory school in Vermont. Not that there had been any individual exchange involved. Nobody had come from Vermont to Helmingham, since my job had been taken over by somebody on the spot: a retired colleague who was delighted to get into harness again. I had been under an ‘exchange’ system only as having been one of a group scattered around the United States, and roughly equivalent to a group of Americans scattered about England for something like the same period of time. I may say I had been rather surprised that Helmingham let me go so easily, since long leave is generally not thought to be consistent with the responsibilities of a housemaster. But our Head had very handsomely backed the proposal from the start. All seemed to have gone well, and I had no vain disposition to suppose that any of my boys had suffered from the interlude. I had enjoyed my travels, and when I did get back to Helmingham just before the beginning of a new term it was contentedly enough. I didn’t even quail when, upon re-entering my study for the first time, I saw a pile of letters waiting for me on the desk.

  But then there was a knock on the door I had barely closed behind me. I called out Avanti! – not as expecting some intending Italian parent about to declare himself, but because schoolmasters do tend to institutionalise that sort of small joke, although only of course with their pupils. And I somehow knew that this was one of them: an early arrival by a clear day before the beginning of term. There are boys – destined to turn out sane and blameless citizens – who are so besotted by the place that they occasionally behave in this tiresome way. But I’d not have expected it of Robin Hayes. And it was Robin Hayes who now came into the room.

  ‘Hallo, Robin! Stout of you to clock in early like this.’

  It was odd how, during those American months, I had let the affairs of the House drop clean out of mind. Now I had remembered just in time that Hayes was behaving quite properly in arriving early and seeking to confer with me. He was a good all-round boy who had taken his Oxbridge hurdle early and gained a place at a decent college. With this settled, he had elected to return to school and receive due promotion to the position of Head of the House, thereby helping me through what he was pleased to believe would prove rather a sticky term.

  So much I had gathered from a brief letter – not much more than a note – which I had received from the Head Master some weeks before. As I read it I could almost hear Hayes explaining his virtuous intention to the small group of dons interviewing him in Oxford. A minority of them would indulgently approve; the majority, while keeping mum, would believe the boy would do better filling petrol-tanks in the forecourt of a garage, or otherwise seeing something of the Real World before settling down amid the Dreaming Spires.

  ‘Can I speak to you, sir?’

  ‘Of course you can. Sit down.’ I think because obscurely alerted, I said this in a no-fuss way. I even reached for a pipe from the pipe-rack which hangs on the wall beneath a yellowing group-photograph of boys ranged around one of my predecessors some time before the First World War. One hesitates, during one’s mere ten or fifteen years’ tenure as a housemaster, to take liberties even with gruesome objects of that sort.

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be too bad,’ I said. ‘This term, I mean.’

  But I could see already there was something wrong. Robin Hayes was an agreeable lad to have in the front row of a form, being alert and cheerful, and owning a clear complexion and a straight glance. But now he looked strained and almost ill. I braced myself for the term’s first crisis, small or moderately large, to be decanted on me.

  ‘I can see you haven’t heard, sir. It’s my father. They’ve put him in prison. Two months ago. Just at the start of the holidays.’

  There had perhaps been the ghost of a reproach at the end of Hayes’s speech, and a second’s silence had served to make it almost audible. I regretted my habit when abroad of not regularly seeking out an English newspaper. For a good many weeks this boy had been expecting some sort of supportive letter from me. That seemed
obvious. So I must try my best to be supportive now, and to make it clear that my attitude would also be the attitude of the entire reassembled House.

  ‘Robin,’ I said, ‘I’m deeply sorry. What has it all been about?’

  ‘I almost can’t bear to tell you.’

  ‘Whatever it is, I’m afraid you’ll have to bear a good deal more than a frank and reasonable talk with your housemaster.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ For a moment the boy eyed me curiously askance. ‘Facing up. Squaring shoulders. All that.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You can’t have heard a word,’ he said. ‘It’s having been so petty and squalid that’s so frightful. My father hasn’t murdered the Dean’s wife, or been caught seducing the Bishop’s boot-boy. It has just been his fingers in the cathedral till.’

  ‘Embezzlement?’

  ‘Yes. And probably, among other things, to pay my bills at this school for the sons of gentlemen. What a laugh!’

  ‘Robin, one of the difficulties will be not dramatising things. Managing to think twice before producing the hard sardonic quip.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  It occurs to me now that this was almost the last private occasion upon which Robin Hayes was to ‘sir’ me. ‘Sir’ from a senior boy to a master can be a stiffly distancing syllable – or so I had sometimes judged it in the past. So I don’t suppose I minded young Hayes dropping it. His family situation was no doubt accelerating the maturing process normally operative at eighteen. Soon, whether warped or not by this sudden disaster, Hayes would be grown up.

  But I wasn’t at the moment making a mental note of that sort. I was recalling whatever I knew about the Hayes family. Hayes’s father was not, as the boy’s words might have suggested, himself a parson. But he was the leading solicitor in a cathedral city, and probably looked after the Chapter’s business affairs. So his misdeed, whatever had been its scale, could virtually be viewed as a pilfering from the alms box. I could hear some decently saddened judge feeling constrained to make the point as he handed out his sentence. Hayes’s mother, I happened to know, was a magistrate of the kind that gives quite a lot of time to sitting on the bench. There must have been accounts of all this in the newspapers I hadn’t seen.

  ‘You’ve met my parents,’ Hayes was saying. ‘When I first came here as a brat, and several times since. They sometimes said I was lucky to have you as a housemaster.’ The boy stopped short on this, as if he’d spoken out of turn. I saw what he was thinking. His father was no longer entitled to be put on record as approving of me.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I remember them both very well.’ For a moment I was at a loss – which is why an odd impulse of curiosity prompted my next question. ‘What do they make your father – I mean how is your father’s time occupied in prison?’

  ‘He works in the garden. It’s what they call an open prison. That’s something of a contradiction in terms, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is, indeed.’ The point, I felt, was a proper one for a well-educated boy to make.

  ‘There are several other men, but it seems my father is the directing intelligence. And a first exhibit of his has just won a prize at a local flower-show.’

  I’d have been obtuse not to feel something uncomfortable about this. It opened up the whole question of how the boy now regarded his father. So I went off on another tack.

  ‘Had your mother known all the time . . .?’ Too late again, I caught myself up. ‘Has it been a great shock to your mother?’ I emended lamely – and told myself I must do better than this.

  ‘My mother’s—well, showing the flag. She has the carriage, of course.’

  ‘The carriage?’ Hayes seemed to have made an extraordinary statement; I had a momentary picture of Mrs Hayes as a Victorian lady driven out to take the air.

  ‘Or the posture or the deportment. I don’t quite know what to call it.’

  ‘The bearing?’

  ‘That’s it. Every afternoon she dresses up just a little more than—well, before it happened. She puts on a hat—that sort of thing. Then she walks through the Close and up the length of the High Street. Looking straight ahead and taking care to be acknowledged by nobody. Then she buys something in a shop and walks home again. I don’t know whether it should be called pride. Anyway, it takes guts. And then I see my father.’

  ‘You see . . .?’ I was bewildered.

  ‘I see him as he’ll walk, if he ever does, up that beastly street – when they let him out again. A kind of furtive shuffle, as if he’d been inside for far longer that in fact he will be. The judge said something about the disgrace alone being a heavy punishment for one in my father’s position. But then something about betraying an honourable profession. You know the way a chap perched up like that feels he has to talk. As a matter of fact, he has a grandson here.’

  ‘Not in the House?’ At this point I must have betrayed something like alarm, for an odd look of amusement flitted for a moment over Hayes’s face.

  ‘No, not as bad as that.’ The tone of this reply hovered, I felt, on the indulgent. ‘The brat’s in School House. David Daviot by name. It’s an additional irony. If that’s the word.’

  ‘But it isn’t. Eironeia in Greek regularly carries a connotation of ignorance, whether actual or affected.’

  There was a longer silence this time. Not unreasonably, Hayes seemed disinclined to say anything further until I had produced something more relevant than pedagogy. I wondered whether he had made a fairly long journey simply to tell me face to face that because of what had happened he was thinking better of his plan to return for a term or a couple of terms as Head of House. It was a problem on which I found myself unready to make a pronouncement off the cuff. I didn’t myself want to lose the lad. But that was irrelevant to the decision he had to make. Money, it occurred to me, might be a consideration in his mind. I didn’t know whether his term’s fees had, as was the general rule, been paid in advance. If so, and if Hayes now withdrew, the school bursar would in the circumstances certainly send the money back. But to whose benefit, heaven knew. Perhaps to the disgraced Mr Hayes in his penal garden. Or perhaps to the defrauded Cathedral Chapter. There was a headache even here.

  Meanwhile something positive had to be said, and it would be rash to proceed as with an open mind, exploring pros and cons. To do so might be to give the boy the impression that I was manoeuvring towards ditching him. And to that, it now came to me, I was wholly opposed. Here at school I was by law in loco parentis to Robin Hayes. And the circumstances of the case even pointed at me as being in loco patris in particular. Hayes might of course have grandfathers, uncles, and even big brothers too. I didn’t know. But here was the boy – attractive in himself and to be compassionated in his situation – in my study, and with a new term starting next day. It was clear to me how I ought to go ahead.

  ‘It’s a sad business,’ I said, ‘and it’s going to take a lot of adjusting to. You’ll come through it all right, Robin, unless I’m much mistaken in you. But it’s a good thing, perhaps, that over the next twelve weeks your hands are going to be pretty full.’

  ‘I do want to come back, you see.’ Hayes said this cautiously and almost warily – as if afraid, I felt, of betraying too much sentiment about the House and about the school in general. ‘Unless,’ he went on quickly, ‘you think it quite wrong.’

  ‘I certainly don’t think that.’

  ‘But there’s my mother obviously, and perhaps I ought to stick to her. Only I have a sister, two years older than I am, who has a secretarial job in the town, and who still lives at home.’ Hayes was now speaking more quickly still. ‘And my mother has always been closer to her than to me. One of those family things. And my mother doesn’t want me to be held up. That’s her expression. She means my plans and career and all that rot to go ahead just as if it hadn’t happened.’ Hayes paused on this, as if something new had come to him. ‘Or because it has happened. The honourable task of redeeming the family name. It sounds a bit corny, I suppose. But I rather stay with
the underlying idea. What do you think?’

  I thought that the boy was showing up well, but knew that he wouldn’t thank me for telling him so.

  ‘My first useful thought is that you get down to the job here right away. Do a lot of the reading your future tutors have no doubt recommended to you. But also help me run this unruly menagerie of ours.’

  ‘That’s just what I don’t want to do: the whole prefectorial business.’ Hayes’s face had flushed suddenly, so that I saw we were coming to what he felt to be the crisis of our discussion. ‘There’s a tiptop Head of House waiting in Macleod. I just want to retire into private life as a respectable Senior. To be unobtrusive. Just an observer.’

  ‘Absolutely impossible.’ Perhaps for the first time in this difficult interview, I spoke with full conviction – this even although I felt that the boy’s mind was not entirely open to me. I thought of Mrs Hayes in that High Street: very much a person observed rather than an observer. Perhaps the boy felt that in that role he himself could no longer tolerate scrutiny. But whatever was nebulously in his head, I had to come down on it at once. ‘Everybody knows you’re due to be Head of House, Robin. So you’d be contriving a piece of theatrical nonsense, and everybody would be outraged. Morale would disintegrate, and the Head Man would just sail in and expel both of us.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like that.’ The boy had contrived to raise rather a cautious smile at this perhaps unseasonable extravagance. ‘And I don’t know about morale. But I do know that it’s a wholly moral authority that a Head of House has to be able to exercise. We’re a civilised school, and prefects oughtn’t to go round lamming into brats’ bottoms with a cane to get a perverted sexual gratification out of it.’

  ‘As they did when I was your age, Robin.’ I had been surprised at the vehemence of that last speech, which hadn’t been pitched at a customary master-and-boy level. I tried to recall whether Robin Hayes had come to us from a prep school in which there were archaic goings-on. But now I had to stick to the main point. ‘Robin, listen. Everybody in the House will come to know about your father, and they’ll all back you up like mad. And it will be the same when you arrive in that Oxford college. Neither what you call your moral authority nor just your general agreeableness will be thought of as in the least impaired by anything that has happened in your home. I sometimes think that the only good point about public-school boys and undergraduates in a college is their astonishing loyalty within the gang. No doubt it applies to skinheads and punk rockers too. And now go away and jump to it. My notice appointing you will be on the board within the next ten minutes, and then you can put one up yourself right away. About stacking tuck-boxes in the locker room, or anything of the sort that you please. And come in to supper with me at about half-past seven, and we’ll talk about other things.’