Avery's Mission Read online

  The pilgrims to Torremolinos (as I think it had been) having departed, I was left in a diminished company representing my own fellow-adventurers. Avery must by this time have made his purchases, and I wondered how he was now going to cope with me. I looked around for him. He had vanished. For a moment I was inclined to conclude that he had bolted; that the encounter with his old headmaster had been so mysteriously traumatic as to oblige him to retire in confusion – abandoning one kind of flight in favour of another. Then I saw that this was an unnecessarily dramatic view. At the farther end of the lounge a corner of his rucksack was distinguishable behind a stout pillar. He had merely gone to earth until we were called to take the air. I don’t think I regarded this as a personal affront, although I may have been chagrined. There was no more to it than that Avery Brenton was shy.

  Upon this view of the matter, I decided so to place myself that I was likely to traverse the long glass corridor, down which we should be shepherded, well ahead of him. This would ensure that he didn’t board the plane before me – a state of affairs that could leave him in the apprehension that I might again tiresomely join him. If I was myself already seated when he entered, he could at once find a place at a comfortable remove. And now I took a further step to ease Avery’s mind. We were on a mid-morning flight; a copy of The Times was under my arm; adopting the Englishman’s immemorial signal of disinterest in his surroundings, I unfolded the newspaper and spread it wide in front of my face. Should Avery peer out from his shelter he would not find me looking enquiringly around.

  But this gesture had an unexpected consequence. Opening the paper at random, I found myself confronted by the Court page. It is here, oddly, that obituary notices appear. I read one: it was about a school-fellow of mine who had become (I now discovered) an eminent marine engineer. I then glanced at those announcements of engagements and marriages over which it is injudicious not to run one’s eye. Only a single piece of intelligence arrested me. It read:

  The marriage arranged between Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Greville-Gregory and Mrs Fernanda Brenton will not take place.

  Avery’s mother – for Mrs Fernanda Brenton was certainly she – appeared to be without luck in a marital way. Her marriage to Jethro Brenton (another name came back to me) had been dissolved ten years ago, and now here was a projected second marriage proving abortive. Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Greville-Gregory sounded, to put the thing crudely, quite a catch for a lady who could not be short of forty. But the impressive-sounding alliance was publicly and humiliatingly ‘off’. I wondered whether here was the reason that Mrs Brenton’s son was ‘on’. Did my encounter with Avery coincide with his being propelled into some situation connected with this bleak five or ten guineas-worth in The Times?

  I was confronting this question when my flight was called, and I put into operation the plan I had formed of being among the first passengers to embark. But as I walked down the sloping corridor in quest of our waiting monster it was with a sense of being in a new relationship to both of Avery’s parents. This was a consequence of having recovered their names. ‘Brenton’ for Avery’s father had brought little to me: no more than one or two jottings in a school roll. ‘Jethro Brenton’ produced something further: not only the man’s being domiciled in Italy but also some obscure intimation – a feeling, a tone, alone left from I still couldn’t recall what mention of fact – of his fortune and condition there. I was sure I had never set eyes on him: certainly not at Anglebury, to which he had never come. Nor in Florence – whither, as I must later explain, my interests had taken me often enough. But in Florence, it now seemed to me, I had heard of him. And it was to Florence his son was going now.

  I was overtaken by a young couple wheeling an infant in a conveyance rather of the sort stacked in supermarkets for the transport of groceries. The airport provided it, and it was enabling these people to keep up a pace that left me standing. But there was no sign of Avery, and I guessed that he was discreetly somewhere in the less hurrying rear. I had called up something elusive about his father; about his mother I was now in possession of a vision much more defined.

  I could see her, and this was because of my having seen her son. Avery took after his mother, at least so far as physical appearance went. She too was compact and fair, and as a girl her complexion must have been of the sort admiringly called ‘brilliant’. I had been introduced to her by Avery’s house-master at my last Speech Day but one, and I had then become aware of having noticed her at similar gatherings before. Although a small woman she was in fact remarkable. And the prime occasion of this was a still youthfully attractive figure and a flair for dress. But there was more than that. Mrs Brenton produced a sensation of impact even at a distance. I have spoken of Avery as ‘manoeuvrable’ – in the sense of one who, at least within the bounds of an environment he understands and accepts, can be reliably despatched to do this or that, and to do it with some economy of felt presence on his own part. His mother’s manoeuvrability was different. She might have been described, were the image not inappropriately masculine, as a light armoured vehicle of sophisticated design, vibrating with the potentiality for purposive and perhaps devastating advance – an advance the more to be reckoned with, it might be, as being upon an unpredictable line and with an eye to one’s flank.

  I had to acquit Mrs Brenton, however, of having, at our only meeting, directed upon me the fire of any private design. She had not been among those parents who launch upon obscure, because necessarily hurried, anecdotes, ostensibly in humorous deprecation of their offspring in one’s charge, but actually intended to present them in some hitherto unperceived advantageous light. She had refrained from soliciting my gratitude for having ‘stood out against’ Eton – that school to which so astonishing a number of mothers explain to one that their husbands’ ‘people’ have always gone. I don’t think she said anything about Avery at all. It is a reticence too infrequently practised by divorced mothers of only sons. Yet about the particular instance there had perhaps been the flavour of a move withheld, even of a tactical opportunity resisted in the interest of some larger strategic scheme. I suspected the lady of reserving me for subsequent and better-timed attack, and I ought to have remembered to feel ashamed when the suspicion proved baseless. Upon Avery’s first failure to gain a place at Oxford, I received no letter from his mother inviting me to conspire in her son’s interest with whatever intimates I had in the higher councils of the university. When he left school his plans were no doubt the subject of correspondence between his house-master and herself. But nothing came to me. It may well have been that Mrs Brenton, on the strength of that single reconnaissance, had arrived at an appreciation which precluded me from being judged worthy of even small-arms fire. But, even had I been convinced of this, I should still have recalled her as an attractive woman. I wondered what had gone wrong in the matter of her lieutenant-colonel.

  We had now been standing patiently for some time in the contemplation of closed glass doors at the end of our promenade: doors in front of which, with arms outspread, stood an attractive young woman in uniform. She was a kind of nursemaid, I told myself, and we were ourselves so many excited children at a party, only thus to be restrained from bursting prematurely in upon the concluding feast – before, say, the balloons had been blown up and the candles lit. The suggestion was enhanced by the actual farther vista, since our plane, forty yards away and to be reached by a walk in open air, had much the appearance of an extremely expensive toy. My sense of this was sufficiently lively to make me glance round for somebody with whom I might share it. It could only be Avery – and there he was, well at the back of the crowd. He had his rucksack on his back, and had managed to possess himself of some other permitted piece of hand-luggage, not of a very burdensome appearance, belonging to an old lady who stood beside him. She had said something, and he was making a cheerful reply. As he did so, our eyes met. He gave me a quick smile, and then looked away again.

  I felt pleased by this re-establishing of communications. There was nothing remotely disagreeable about Avery Brenton, but he wasn’t a charmer either. His ordinariness seemed entire, so entire that there was something appealing in it. When the glass doors opened and we walked across the tarmac – the majority of us angling off from a superior few who were to travel first class – I thought how many boys just like Avery had left school without my ever having known much about their characters or circumstances. I should still meet some of them from time to time at Old Boys’ gatherings to which I had been bidden. I should enquire, and be answered that this man did such a thing and that man another. But I should be retaining little, and this perhaps because it is too much with the careers of his clever or attractive boys (occasionally, indeed, his sensationally wicked ones) that a schoolmaster, whatever his after-dinner professions, concerns himself. From the point of view of engaging the human spectacle, it’s a mistake. For the commonplace boys are simply so very much more numerous than the distinguished ones that it is to individuals among their number that the moments of really curious interest must chiefly come. What most repays observation, I suppose, is the ordinary man spied out in the extraordinary situation.

  III

  We had boarded the plane a little late, and it was now wasting no time. I had hardly sat down and got out my book when we were enjoined to stop smoking and fasten our seat-belts. It seemed to me there was going to be an empty place on my right. But then I glanced up, and saw Avery standing beside it.

  It was an odd moment. He was looking at me in dismay, for his finding himself where he did was an instance of what is now called the psycho-pathology of everyday life – for which the old-fashioned expression is doing something accidentally on purpose. Avery had, and had not, wanted to travel with me. And here he was.

  ‘Did
you get your whisky?’ I asked, and moved The Times from the seat beside me to a kangaroo-like pouch on the seat in front.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ Avery sat down and fastened his belt. ‘Only they didn’t have a malt whisky. Which is what’—he added anxiously—’my mother told me is best.’

  As I offered reassurance about this, the plane moved forward – without haste, but rather in the manner of a cricketer who has been called in from the deep field to deliver the next over. Through the window on my left I saw our departure terminal wheel on us, and then a group of people standing on a balcony.

  ‘Just come to stare at us,’ Avery said with satisfaction. ‘I’ve flown once or twice before – to Paris, to Munich – but never in a jet.’ We were stationary again for some moments, as if the bowler had arrived at the start of his run, and was surveying the field. Then the sudden, mounting, and crucial uproar broke out. The bowler was a very fast bowler indeed, and we waited in a long suspense for the ball to be delivered. ‘Airborne,’ Avery said expertly. And he added: ‘Well, I’ve done it now.’

  He had not simply implied, I knew, that he had at length achieved jet propulsion. What he did imply, I had an instinct that I was presently to be told. And meantime there had appeared beside us a young woman with a trolley. Avery glanced at this, beset by social doubt.

  ‘You’ll have a glass of sherry with me?’ I asked. At some gathering of ‘leavers’ I must have invited Avery to this mild intemperance in what he probably regarded as his remote past, so there seemed nothing against it now. And it was clear to me that the boy – the man, as I must henceforward think of him – had something to get off his chest.

  ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ I had noticed Avery take an awed but appreciative glance at the Hebe of the aperitifs, and I wondered whether the girl at Somerville was as pretty. Here was one of the numerous departments of life in which Avery Brenton was not a complicated person. He tasted the sherry with circumspection. ‘Rather good,’ he said. And he added, as with knowledge: ‘Dry.’

  We were now climbing steadily to whatever air corridor had been allotted us. Apart from the arrival of a kind of mini-luncheon, nothing would happen until we dropped down into Lombardy. Except conversation with Avery; and I realised that what I should learn about him was either a lot or nothing at all. He had put down his sherry, which he was going to drink at a pace congruent with my own, and was feeling for something in a pocket. I glimpsed this object as a shiny briar pipe; Avery, however, thrust it away again, having perhaps resolved to treat it (with an impulse that might have been his mother’s) as a strategic reserve.

  ‘Sir,’ he asked, ‘do you know much about Florence?’ And then, as if to relieve me of the possible discomfiture of having to profess ignorance of something of moment, he added: ‘I don’t expect it’s a very important town.’

  ‘It’s not enormous, like Milan or Turin.’

  ‘I see.’ Although it is improbable that I had betrayed amusement, Avery flushed. ‘Of course, I know about it’s being a great art-city at the Renaissance’—the Renaissance seemed to be with Avery a strong card—’and full of tremendous things. But I haven’t got the impression that much goes on.’

  ‘There was a bad flood some years ago. They probably regarded that as a going-on while it was happening. And at the moment the place is interesting politically. There might be a communist municipality at any time.’

  ‘The communists might run it?’ It seemed that I had startled Avery.

  ‘Yes. Do you think that must be very bad?’

  ‘I don’t know much about politics.’ Avery glanced at me distrustfully. ‘The Russians have done some pretty filthy things—don’t you think, sir? But then, so have those military people in Greece. That’s awful, it seems to me. You expect officers to be gentlemen. I’ve heard that in the Second World War, the German Officer Corps wasn’t really too bad. It was Hitler and a lot of cads around him who were so vile.’

  ‘I believe there’s at least a limited truth in that.’ It would have been erroneous to regard these remarks of Avery’s as indicating an old-fashioned mind. He had employed expressions which hadn’t ceased to have meaning for boys of his sort merely because they had become, for social reasons, taboo. And he had done so as part of an impulse to be frank with me. ‘But you were asking me about Florence,’ I went on. ‘As it happens, I go there quite a lot – chiefly to work in the Laurentian Library.’

  ‘Laurentian? T. E. Lawrence?’

  ‘No, not him.’ I decided I could without offence be amused by this. ‘And not D. H., either.’

  ‘I knew it couldn’t be the man who wrote the sex-books.’ Avery spoke stiffly. But, for one so astonishingly ignorant, he did appear to own a certain pertinacity in seeking knowledge. ‘Some other Lawrence?’ he said.

  ‘One of those Medici, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Lorenzo the Magnificent!’

  Avery produced this – obviously out of the red guide-book – with such triumph that I was as pleased as if I had heard of this old pupil taking a First in Greats. And as I judged it a good idea to be communicative about myself I went on to tell him something of the research I had managed to get back to intermittently during my schoolmastering career. Avery listened attentively. When I had finished he offered a comment which, although it testified to a certain historical confusion, was expressed in wholesome form.

  ‘I never knew,’ he said, ‘that there were books – real books – before the Dark Ages.’

  Our little trays had arrived before Avery took his plunge.

  ‘I’m going out to visit my father,’ he said abruptly. ‘He lives at a place outside Florence called Fiesole. Do you know it?’ Avery paused. ‘Up among some hills,’ he added helpfully. ‘And there are remains.’

  ‘Remains? Yes, of course. Including a Roman theatre.’

  ‘I see you do know it. And slaves. At least, the book says slaves, although it seems a bit odd. Statues, perhaps.’

  ‘Excavations.’ It had taken me a moment to sort out this etymological confusion. ‘I’m not going to be far from Fiesole myself. More than half-way up to it. Florence itself is crowded and noisy at this time of year.’

  ‘I’d have thought it would always be awfully quiet.’ Avery was surprised. ‘Except for monks and nuns.’

  ‘They’re not usually a turbulent section of society.’ For a moment I had suspected that Avery was making fun of me. But it wasn’t so. Written all over his face, indeed, was the sense of grave things to come.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘whether you had to be clued up about the family affairs of Anglebury boys.’ He hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, my parents haven’t been living together for a long time. I was always told their marriage had been dissolved, and I thought that meant something different from divorce. But it’s just another word meaning the same thing.’

  ‘I did have a note about it. And, since the divorce, your father has lived in Italy?’

  ‘Yes—but he was in Italy a good deal even before that. Because of his work, I think. It’s why I scarcely remember him.’

  ‘Do you mean you haven’t so much as seen him since you were quite small?’

  ‘Well, not since I was seven or eight. Not for more than ten years, that is.’

  ‘I see.’ This new light on Avery’s situation explained his remark that he had ‘done it now’. I had been wrong in supposing that he must have had regular contacts with his father. What he was undertaking was an encounter with a parent who was a stranger to him. ‘Are you going for long?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. It’s happened suddenly.’