Parlour Four Page 10

  Then – but a good many years later – a new factor emerged. All three were eventually sent to the same school: a grammar school of some note which had lately become ‘independent’ and cost parents a good deal of money. Having two, or even three, sons at the school simultaneously was a form of conspicuous expenditure rather admired by the community at large. What emerged from this set-up, however, was an institution providing rigorous academic training for a minority of clever boys in part financed through the intake of a majority of ‘thickies’ (as they were occasionally called by the masters in their common room) whose best chance of distinction lay within the field of athletic prowess. The school was thus a somewhat polarised place.

  It certainly polarised the young Patchetts. In no time at all, those masters who prided themselves as early spotters of talent were predicting an Oxford scholarship for Tom Patchett. Contrastingly, Dick and Harry – Tom’s younger twin brothers as the school understood them to be – might, if they took their rugger seriously, end up with the modest distinction of playing for the Second Fifteen.

  So here was sibling jealousy in the making. The three boys were no longer ‘getting along well’ either with each other or with the senior Patchetts. The culprit initially was Tom, without a doubt. A strain of arrogance (inherited from heaven knew whom) was becoming more and more apparent in him. Precocious in his reading as in almost everything else, he had found a poem that spoke of the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goals, and this he chanted gleefully at Dick and Harry, without much regarding the context in which Kipling had placed the lines. But Dick and Harry were quickly at fault too. That they were younger than Tom was by this time scarcely apparent as a matter of physique, and they were also two to one. ‘Scrag him!’ they would shout each to the other, and a very ill-tempered rumpus would follow.

  Arthur Patchett was upset. There was positively bad blood between the boys – and at times actual blood as well from a cut lip or a punched nose. In fact, Arthur no longer presided over anything like a happy family. Moreover, his wife had ceased to feel that the true relationship between the three boys should be concealed through an indefinite future. She wanted the truth to be revealed now. The parents had thus exchanged grounds.

  ‘But, Muriel,’ her husband said just after there had been a particularly disagreeable dispute between Tom and his suppositious brothers, ‘I think I was right quite a long time ago in feeling that the situation should be explained then and there, when they were all three too young to know that it was anything very unusual or to be bothered about. But now we’re in a particularly sticky phase. Tom and the twins have got up against each other, and it’s largely due to some kind of rivalry between them that has developed at school. Give them a little time, and they’ll get over it. This is precisely not the moment to come out with the thing.’

  ‘I don’t see that. But I do see that it’s something to do with the school. Tom is better at his books. All that silly Latin and maths come much more easily to him than to our own children.’

  Arthur Patchett was silent for some moments. When Muriel had said ‘our own children’ she was breaking a kind of taboo long-since agreed between them. But it was true, Arthur had to admit, that Dick and Harry were their own children, which Tom in a radical way was not. And Muriel was more likely to be constantly aware of the fact than he was. It was without any birth-pangs that Tom had come to them.

  Made sharply aware of this, Arthur prolonged his silence. He may be said even to have searched his own heart. Was there going to be a rift in the family – and a rift in which he and his wife were to be on opposite sides? It ought to be possible to regard such a situation as inconceivable. But it looked like being true. To begin with something unimportant yet with a lurking significance, it wouldn’t readily come to him to speak of Latin and maths as ‘silly’. He was a sound businessman, and had a sound businessman’s respect for ability wherever he found it. Such a man was likely to be as pleased as Punch on discovering that some young clerk he had imported into his office was proving to possess abilities or aptitudes that were likely to take him right up the ladder. He himself had never had a Latin grammar in his hands, and his sums were done for him on machines. But it pleased him to think of Tom as likely to go to Oxford and shine there.

  ‘I’m not at all sure,’ he now heard his wife say, ‘that it wouldn’t do Tom good to be taken down a bit. He’s becoming conceited, if you ask me.’

  ‘I know what you mean, my dear. But I’m inclined to think that “conceited” isn’t quite the word for the boy. He’s simply becoming conscious of his own endowments.’

  ‘Yes – and that they’re going to take the shine off Dick and Harry. I don’t at all like that in the family.’

  ‘Of course not. But aren’t you being a little unfair to Tom? I agree that he has a pride that may lead him into trouble. But he’s up against these slightly younger brothers – as he supposes them to be – who are good at games, and so on; in fact at the kind of things that the majority of schoolboys particularly admire. And I’m not sure that Dick and Harry don’t physically humiliate Tom at times. Acting together, they have almost twice the muscular equipment that he has.’ Arthur Patchett made one of his frequent pauses, as if surprised by the words and sentiments he had heard himself uttering. ‘Muriel,’ he then said, ‘we must be extremely careful. It’s clear to me that Tom must indeed be told about the manner of his coming to us. And told quite soon. But behind the stating of the facts there mustn’t be the slightest hint that we are telling him—well, that he is no son of ours.’

  For a short period after this discussion Arthur Patchett felt able to tell himself that it had in a thoroughly wholesome fashion cleared the air. The three boys, of course, knew nothing about it, and the rift between them remained unaltered. But Muriel, who had for some time contrived to have little to say to Tom, seemed to have taken her husband’s brief homily to heart, and now talked to her adopted son quite a lot. Tom, on his part, seemed on his way to conquering, or at least abating, the irritating arrogance that had lately possessed him. It was perhaps – Arthur thought – because things were going well with him at school; he had been awarded a prize for an essay on Oliver Cromwell, and had begun to contribute to the school magazine. So it was out of an almost clear sky that the thunderbolt came.

  ‘Please show me my birth certificate.’

  Tom had walked into a room called for some reason the study, in which Arthur Patchett was accustomed to smoke a pipe and read a newspaper after the evening meal. Tom had given a formal knock on the door, and on opening it had wasted few words.

  It was as bad a moment as had befallen Arthur for a long time. Either his wife had disregarded what had been in all but its phraseology a command, or she had badly underestimated

  Tom’s ability to draw an accurate conclusion from some ambiguous phrase or hint of a mystery. Probably it was the second of these conjectures that was correct. It was possible, too, that Tom had for long a little wondered about himself. That he chanced to bear a considerable physical likeness to the twins might have militated against any distinct sense of his being among the Patchetts a kind of cuckoo in the nest. But consanguinity or the absence of it may intimate itself intuitively at some deep level of the mind, and thence erupt into consciousness upon some quite slender prompting occasion. All this Arthur Patchett dimly knew. He was reflecting on it as the boy briefly studied the document which had been extracted from a locked drawer by the man whom he had been brought up to address as Father.

  ‘It’s not all that informative,’ Tom said. ‘But it’s enough for a start. I’m no Patchett. That’s what it comes to, isn’t it?’

  It was almost as if, at fifteen, Tom had suddenly grown up; and before his bald question Arthur, as might be expected, was extremely distressed. Muriel and he between them, he felt, had made a shocking mess of things. He had known, he repeated to himself, that from the earliest age at which Tom could understand what he was being told, his position as an adop
ted child ought to have been made clear to him, and then steadily treated as of no account in point of the normal loyalties and sanctities of family life. So much, at this critical moment, Arthur understood clearly. But just what was he to say to Tom now? What he did say was bound to be well intentioned, since he was steadily a well-intentioned man. He knew this to be so, and he plucked a certain measure of confidence from knowing it. And in that confidence he spoke.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘dear Tom, you mustn’t feel let down. I know it’s hard, but you must stick to the knowledge that we think of you in every way just as we think of Dick and Harry. We’re one family, however we came to be so. And we’ll stay that way.’

  ‘Dick and Harry don’t know? They’ve been as ignorant as I’ve been?’

  ‘They certainly don’t know – my dear, dear boy.’

  ‘Then I’m going to be the first to tell them.’

  As he said this, Tom tossed the fatal scrap of paper to the floor and turned and left the room.

  Left to himself, Arthur Patchett dropped in a kind of stupour into his chair. The mess was worse than ever, and he groaned as he felt that the situation had passed entirely out of his control. He was still in this condition when, some ten minutes later, the study door opened and his wife came in. So, too, did a great deal of noise from an upper region of the house: so much noise, in fact, that Muriel had to shout to make herself heard.

  ‘Whatever is it?’ she demanded. ‘Arthur, what have you done?’

  ‘I’ve told Tom about himself. I had to. He’d pretty well found out. You must have—’ Arthur checked himself. ‘And he said he was going to tell the twins.’

  ‘Listen! I suppose that’s Tom telling them?’ Even as Muriel spoke, the disturbance upstairs changed its character. There was rather less shouting. But now there came a kind of pounding and bumping that shook the ceiling above the senior Patchetts’ heads.

  ‘They’re fighting,’ Muriel said. ‘Worse than ever, by the sound of it. And all because you—’ Muriel, in turn, checked herself. ‘You must go up and stop them.’

  Thus challenged, Arthur did get to his feet and move uncertainly towards the door. But the door opened before he reached it, and Dick Patchett stumbled into the room, revealing to his agitated parents a bloodied nose and a bunged-up eye.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dick shouted. ‘What the hell’s going on? What rubbish have you been chucking at Tom? It is rubbish, isn’t it? We’ve been telling him so, and—and trying to enforce the bloody argument. But Tom’s mad. Tom’s gone mad, I tell you!’ Dick paused for a moment to apply a grubby handkerchief to his injured eye. ‘He’s always been pretty tough. It has taken Harry and me all we’ve got to do a bit more than hold our own with him. But now he’s strong like he never was before. He’s licked both of us! That’s madness, isn’t it?’

  At this point Harry Patchett tumbled into the study in his turn, shouting as he did so.

  ‘Just what’s cooking?’ Harry demanded. ‘Tom says he’s not our brother. Bloody hell, he’s not! He has always been our brother, and he always will be. And he has more brains than the rest of us all put together. I told him he was talking a load of crap, and he went and knocked one of my teeth out! I never thought he had it in him! He has gone off his head, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, hasn’t he?’ Dick echoed. ‘He’s still our brother, isn’t he – even if he’s gone completely bonkers? He says he’s clearing out. I got him one you can guess where when he said that. But then he said it again. I think he’s packing.’

  ‘Both of you go to your rooms at once.’ Arthur Patchett had summoned to his aid all the remnants of his authority. Ghastly as the mess was, he could, he felt, still control his own children. The boy – or youth – called Thomas Patchett was another matter; was suddenly become an unknown quantity or quality with whom a new relationship would have to be worked out. ‘Have a thorough wash,’ he amplified, ‘and take care not to bloody the towels. Then go to bed, and be equally careful about the sheets. We’ll talk about all this in the morning.’

  Suddenly obedient but still bewildered, the Patchett twins took their departure from their father’s study. For some seconds Arthur and Muriel gazed at one another wordlessly, and then Muriel spoke.

  ‘They’ll never forgive us,’ Muriel said.

  ‘For allowing a cuckoo in the nest?’

  ‘Arthur, try not to be so stupid!’

  His wife, Arthur thought, must be much overwrought to utter so senseless – indeed, so outrageous – an injunction. He must go carefully with her.

  ‘My dear,’ he said mildly, ‘just what do you mean?’

  ‘That they’re fond of Tom. They admire him. If Tom really goes away, Dick and Harry – well, Dick and Harry won’t like it at all. They’ll feel disgraced, and that you and I are disgraced too.’

  ‘Tom won’t go away. He’s too young to find himself a job. And, apart from ourselves, he has nobody else in the world to turn to.’

  ‘That’s perfectly true.’

  This came from Tom – Thomas Patchett as he perfectly legally was – who had appeared suddenly in the room with them. He was pale; like Dick he was going to have a spectacular black eye; as if some antagonist were still before him, his right hand guarded his crotch. But despite this indecorous oddity, he was evidently entirely in command of himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said composedly. ‘That is the position entirely.’

  ‘We were given to understand you were packing,’ Arthur Patchett said – and was instantly horrified by the feeble tone of jocularity he had sought to take refuge in.

  ‘I’ve had second thoughts about that . . . sir.’’ It was at once apparent that all Tom’s arrogance had returned to him. He took his right hand from where it had rested, stooped, and picked up the scrap of official documentation that still lay on the carpet. ‘As I remarked before,’ he said, ‘it isn’t all that informative. But perhaps I can find out more when I’ve learnt the ropes. Meanwhile, I’ll stay with you – with all four of you – and help you in any way I can. Not to worry, sir. Not to worry, Mrs Patchett. I can manage with those two boys, you know. Common clay, certainly. But there’s something that’s nice enough about them.’

  Momentarily at least, neither Arthur nor Muriel found a word to say. Unversed in psychiatry, they were ignorant of being in contact with what modern mad doctors have called the Myth of the Birth of the Hero.

  ‘And now,’ Tom said, ‘I think I’ll go to bed. But remember: it’s only four Patchetts that are going to wake up tomorrow morning. Gaudeamus igitur.’

  ‘And just what does that mean?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘It means that we can rejoice that it’s just that way. Good night.’

  THE DYSLEXIA FACTOR

  I

  Le nez de Cléopâtre: s’il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé. The thought is offered to us by Pascal, and is more or less echoed by Pope when he reflects on what mighty contests rise from trivial things.

  I begin my narrative like this by way of owning—or shall I say merely making clear?—that although I have earned my living as a scholar of sorts I am essentially no more than a belletrist: one who potters about the byways of literature offering such amiable remarks as he can. I am therefore ill-equipped to enter into any scientific field whatever, let alone to render verisimilar and convincing a sequence of untoward events requiring for their adequate exposition a good deal of physiology, neurology, endocrinology, and things of that sort. But I must do my best – simply because sheer chance decreed my presence at what I am convinced was the seminal moment, the very fons et origo, of a distinctly fateful affair: of a ‘trivial thing’, in fact, that came to threaten upheaval potentially comparable with anything effected by Cleopatra’s nose in the world of Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar.

  So there, for a start, is a confessional paragraph. I can at least try to be a conscientious historian.

  As a boy, and for a brief period, I had two very intelligent acquaintances. The firs
t was called Martin Brand, and the second I never came to know other than by his surname, which was Howe. Martin and I were day-boys together at a preparatory school in Oxford, and we were intimates for perhaps a couple of years. Then Martin gained a scholarship to Winchester, while I went to my father’s less intellectually-distinguished public school. At once we dropped entirely out of one another’s lives: partly because of this, and partly because my family went to live in Hull, where my father, having abandoned hope of further advancement at Oxford, had become a professor in some branch of mediaeval literature. Whether to go, or not to go, had produced quite a pother among us: a fact worth mentioning since it instances the very compassable concerns which alone came within my experience until, in middle age, I ran into the alarming events I now propose to relate. That I simply forgot about Martin Brand in the interval is the more remarkable in that, as a boy, he had made a strong if obscure impression on me. He wasn’t in any common sense a rebel; at our prep school he was so busy coming top in everything that his behaviour was as conformist as might be; when he went eventually to Cambridge he may have become for a time a wild or angry young man; if so, I never heard anything about it. But I can only say that as, still in shorts, we mucked around together, I had a dim sense of him as nursing what I have to call an anarchic streak inside.