An Open Prison Read online

  ‘Very well.’ Hayes had got to his feet, and the slightly equivocal smile made another brief appearance. ‘I’ll do just as you tell me. Provisionally, that is.’

  ‘Yes, of course. You’re not signing indentures, you know.’

  ‘I think you have a bit of a line on that loyalty biznai yourself. Half-past seven, then.’

  And the boy departed. For a moment I wondered about the odd word he’d used – and then I remembered it belonged to Beetle’s slang in Stalky & Co. It was clear that Hayes felt very miserable about his father’s disgrace. That he could manage a momentary and friendly mockery of his housemaster doing his thing seemed not a bad augury for the coming term.

  So I was left alone and to my own reflections. It was a situation in which I’d too rarely find myself during the three months ahead. An unmarried housemaster is regarded as lusus naturae, a freak unencumbered by private cares and therefore at all hours available to elucidate whatever professional conundrums turn up. It was true that I had an admirable Matron. Miss Sparrow, a lady of mature age, was adept at momentarily extending the reach of her authority so as to relieve me of much pointless badgering. And Miss Sparrow maintained, from term’s end to term’s end, a sensitive finger on the pulse of the House. I didn’t feel I could properly repeat to her in any detail my talk with Robin Hayes. But what had happened to Robin Hayes’s father was public property. I could discover what, in a general way, she felt was going to be the boy’s position among us. Not that I hadn’t – as must be clear from what I’ve written – made up my mind on how he was likely to be regarded by his schoolfellows. But it would be reassuring to have my own view confirmed by a good judge of boys’ behaviour.

  These thoughts – not of a robust order, I can now see – were in my head when suddenly they were displaced by a vivid visual image – almost an eidetic image such as comes to one on the fringes of sleep. What I thus saw was Mrs Hayes, walking up that High Street and wearing that hat. I could have described the cut of her clothes and named the colour of her scarf. She was a handsome woman in early middle-age, big-breasted but with the further bulk of her person well-controlled whether by regimen or by art. And there was no doubt about what her son had called her carriage. She moved as might an Italian woman indulging herself in the passeggiata while conscious that she belongs to the leading family in town. It was an apparition, I realised, compounded of memory equally with imagination: I must have seen Hayes’s mother thus walking between chapel and cricket-field upon some parents’ summer-term occasion.

  But what then of Hayes’s father? Was he too going to dredge himself out of memory – but in the broad-arrowed, pyjama-like garments in which convicts were invariably portrayed in the comic papers of my childhood?

  Mr Hayes, I found at once, was eidetically a non-starter. I could summon up only a dim image of him that told me nothing – or perhaps only that he was dim. But yet again, he wasn’t quite that to his son. ‘Furtive shuffle’ had been Robin’s proleptic vision of how the wretched man would move when let out of gaol. It had been an uncomfortably evocative phrase. I didn’t think, however, that one could take it as betraying that a settled resentment was now the main component in Hayes’s feeling about his father. I’d rather have not heard it, all the same.

  Embezzlement, I next told myself, is surely a pitiful kind of criminal enterprise, particularly when indulged in on a small scale in a county and cathedral town. Sooner or later one is almost sure to be detected – and without having enjoyed much fun meanwhile. The conjectural dimness of Mr Hayes chimed in with that clearly enough. And now another point occurred to me. There was nothing out of the way in a woman of some standing in a community being elevated into acting for it as a magistrate. But there was likely to be something masterful about such a person, all the same. And although Mr Hayes might have been too superior a solicitor to do much or even anything in the way of defending drunks and poachers and careless motorists before a batch of local beaks, there couldn’t be other than some awkwardness in two diverse legal activities cohabiting under one roof.

  And finally in this survey of the situation there was something else that Hayes had told me about his set-up at home. ‘One of those family things’ had been his comment on the fact that his mother inclined more to her daughter than to her son. I felt this to contribute to my view – a sketchy view – of the Hayes family as matriarchal in its structure. Ma Hayes – it might vulgarly be put – was boss. Several of my fellow housemasters, to whom the very idea of female dominance was abhorrent, believed that difficult or out-of-step boys often proved to have that sort of background.

  Later that morning Miss Sparrow came in for what was our customary beginning-of-term review of the state of affairs on the domestic side of the House. I used to make a little joke with her about what I called our ‘chronic anxieties over the cook’. Strictly speaking, I was as responsible for all that sort of thing as if I had been the sole proprietor of a lodging-house. But here again Miss Sparrow was well equipped to provide – as unobtrusively as might be – a welcome lending hand. Not that she was unobtrusive in a general way. An admiral’s daughter, she would have done excellently in private theatricals as a jolly Jack Tar. There was something about this that made our relationship an easy one. It might readily, I suppose, have been delicate, since she was, after all, a single lady residing with a single gentleman under one roof. I was not wholly without masculine support from time to time, since I occasionally had a junior master quartered with me. But as my companion in the House Miss Sparrow was at present as sole as the Arabian bird – although the comparison is no doubt inept, the phoenix having been of the male sex if of any sex at all.

  I gave Miss Sparrow some account of my American experiences, and she responded with a brisk narrative of having accompanied an invalid brother to Crete and Rhodes. It had been a packaged tour, but one of a highly cultivated sort. The brother – not a retired sailor but a retiring Cambridge scholar – had been incensed by the insufficient archaeological learning exhibited by the Greek cicerone of the party, and had judged it necessary to set matters in a clearer light by delivering extemporary lectures of his own. The actual occasions of his doing this could not, I felt, have been other than embarrassing. But Miss Sparrow succeeded in making them sound quite funny.

  We then got down to that domestic business, but it didn’t occupy us for long. I could see that during my long absence things had ticked over very well. There were to be a dozen new boys, and they would arrive, some with parents, that afternoon. It was an arrangement giving these small fry the better part of a day to settle in before the confident and noisy established crew arrived. A running tea-party for dads and mums was entailed on me as a result. But here again Miss Sparrow had been at work, producing as a kind of aide-mémoire some jottings on those of the neophytes whose special needs I ought to show myself aware of. When we had run through these I turned to what was much more certainly in my mind.

  ‘It seems to have been a bad business,’ I said, ‘that of Hayes’s father.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Poor old Toad.’

  ‘Toad?’ I repeated. It seemed an odd way to refer to an unfortunate solicitor.

  ‘Toad in The Wind in the Willows. He went dippy about motorcars, too.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t catch on to this.’

  ‘You didn’t read about the trial?’

  ‘I hadn’t so much as heard of it until the boy came to see me earlier this morning. But what he had to say distressed me very much.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry to have been flippant about it.’ Miss Sparrow’s sorrow was not reflected in her features, which never bore other than a cheerful cast. ‘You see, it was the Rolls-Royce that took the public fancy, and led to a fairly full reporting of the whole case. Mr Hayes pleaded guilty to the charge, and was allowed by the judge to make a statement from the dock. He said he’d always wanted a Rolls-Royce, and was saving up for one. Unfortunately it had turned out that he was building up the necessary cash at the expense of other pe
ople.’

  ‘Good heavens, Miss Sparrow, the wretched man must have been out of his mind! Wasn’t his sanity inquired into?’

  ‘Apparently not. The judge said something in passing about “reprehensible eccentricity”, and left it like that. He probably felt that poor Mr Hayes had said the first thing that came into his head – by way of concealing, of course, some authentic reason for his misconduct. My own guess is that he was being blackmailed over something, and that the judge, a Mr Justice Daviot, took a humane view of the affair, and called it a day, so to speak, on the Rolls-Royce story.’

  ‘It seems to me likely that your guess, my dear lady, will have been shared with a good many other people.’

  I didn’t, I ought to say, address Miss Sparrow as ‘my dear lady’ except when I was considerably upset. I may have been reflecting that there was something peculiarly unfortunate in the Hayes affair trailing behind it a suggestion of misdeeds still unrevealed. But I now produced a factual question which I had somehow been unable to put to the imprisoned man’s son.

  ‘For how long was Hayes sent to gaol?’

  ‘For two years. I believe that means in practice sixteen months. But only if Mr Hayes behaves in a well-conducted way.’

  ‘And it means that Robin Hayes will be in his first year at Oxford. The whole thing, Miss Sparrow, is the devil of a mess.’ I paused on this, recalling that Robin Hayes had said nothing to me about the Rolls-Royce, which he probably regarded as an unbearable absurdity. Then I remembered something else. ‘It seems there’s a boy called Daviot in School House. A brat, as they insist on going on calling juniors. A grandson of this judge. Do you happen to have heard of him?’

  ‘I believe I’ve noticed the name in the school roll. The connection didn’t occur to me. And it seems not likely to add to that devil of a mess.’

  Had Miss Sparrow and myself not been fast friends, this echoing of my phrase might have been irritating. As it was, it was merely being hinted to me that we mustn’t make too heavy weather of the Hayes affair. Nevertheless, I instanced a further misgiving.

  ‘It’s curious,’ I said, ‘how in a public school each house tends so much to keep itself to itself. Wholesome rivalry at a distance, and so on, is the key to our relationships. So I don’t think there will be silly gossip about this unfortunate business throughout the school. Only I wish the Daviot boy were a little more senior than he is. Some of my colleagues moan over the difficulty of having to cope with young men within a system essentially designed for children. My own view is that it is often the younger boys who are irresponsible. They haven’t quite got hold of the spirit of the place.’

  Miss Sparrow might well have made fun of this schoolmasterly remark. Instead, she looked serious, and made a thoughtful pause before speaking again.

  ‘I heard that Robin Hayes had gained a place at Oxford. That makes his time his own for a good many months ahead. Has he had any reason to come back to school?’

  ‘I have the impression that he planned it out quite long ago. He’d have a shot at Oxford entrance, and if he made it he’d return to lend a hand with the House.’

  ‘I’ve known of boys doing that from time to time. It’s usually because they want a spell of power before becoming insignificant freshmen at a university. But I’m not sure that anything of the kind quite fits in with my idea of Hayes.’

  ‘It doesn’t any longer seem to fit in with his own idea of himself either.’ I believe I betrayed some annoyance as I said this. ‘He wanted to return as a private citizen. That makes nonsense of his notion of being my right-hand boy. I had to tell him it wouldn’t do.’

  ‘No doubt you were entitled to do that.’ When minded to, Miss Sparrow never spared me a hint of criticism. ‘But I continue to find the whole thing puzzling in the light of his present fix. For it is a fix. And I’d suppose it would be his impulse to get away from the old familiar faces, not to dive in among them.’

  I felt that there was more force in this contention of our Matron’s than I was altogether willing to acknowledge, and I hesitated to reply with any reference to what Hayes himself had called the loyalty biznai. So I thought of something else.

  ‘It’s a good point,’ I said. ‘But look at it another way. The boy suffers this terrific shock about his father, and feels that a whole alien world is staring at him in that gossiping cathedral town. But here at Helmingham is a society in which his own efforts have gained him a secure and decent regard. From you and me, Miss Sparrow, as well as from his peers. He has a place here, and he makes for it. In your own phrase, he dives in among us. We mustn’t let him drown.’

  Perhaps I meant to say, ‘let him down’, since I am not much given to metaphorical expression. But Miss Sparrow seemed to judge that I had designed to close our conference on a note of muted drama. So she went about her business as I did about mine.

  For a minute or two I wasn’t quite sure what my business was. At any time the beginning of a new term brings a housemaster innumerable chores, and this increases – at least the sense of it increases – if one has had a spell away from the school. There was that pile of letters. But then it occurred to me that the proper thing would be to make a species of courtesy call on the Head Master. I had been away for quite a long time. So I crossed the cricket field to John Stafford’s house.

  Stafford had a ‘come in at any time’ rule with members of the staff. He worked with his study door open, and one either walked in with a token knock or halted at any sound of voices and hung about or went away. On this occasion he was disengaged, and he stood up at once and shook hands.

  ‘Delighted to see you back, Syson,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re feeling refreshed.’ The tone of this was correct, but I didn’t quite like the choice of words. Conversing with Stafford, one frequently didn’t know whether he had been inadvertently tactless or deliberately astringent. And here there seemed to be an intimation that I had been judged to leave Helmingham in a jaded and probably rather useless state. ‘You must be particularly glad to find,’ Stafford went on, ‘that things have been going unusually well on the classical side.’

  Spoken thus to the head of the school’s Classics department, these words were infelicitous, to say the least. But Stafford was being hospitable the while, having moved over to a side table on which stood half a dozen wine glasses and a single decanter. The idea was, I think, to suggest to parents that none of us at Helmingham was of a heavily bibulous habit.

  ‘A glass of sherry, Syson?’ he asked.

  I accepted sherry. Stafford always addressed us by our surnames. And we always replied, even upon the most informal occasions, with ‘Head Master’. I approved of this. Between adults, one ought not to address as ‘Rupert’ or ‘Roger’ a man who cannot reply comfortably with ‘Timothy’ or whatever it may be. And to have the junior masters saying ‘John’ to Stafford would have been inappropriate.

  ‘Thank you for your note about Hayes,’ I said. It was an index of how keenly I felt for my boy’s position that I started in with this at once, and before there was any chance of small talk about my travels.

  ‘Hayes?’ For a moment Stafford appeared to be at sea, as if effort were required to disentangle this particular boy from amid the multiplicity of his headmasterly concerns.

  I was annoyed by this, as I judged it, affectation – which accounts for what I next said.

  ‘It was perhaps, Head Master, a little on the uninformative side.’

  ‘My dear Syson, I’m extremely sorry. Deeply sorry.’ Stafford was inclined to be lavish with his purely formal expressions of contrition. ‘I hesitated to burden you with the boy’s troubles until you were back at school. And I corresponded, I hope adequately, with his mother. No doubt she has written to you as well.’

  ‘No doubt. The letters that came too late to forward to me are waiting for me in my study now.’

  ‘I can see that Mrs Hayes is worried about the money – both in relation to us and to Oxford later on. Of course the boy has been rather brisk about Oxford u
nder their present early-place system. I’d have preferred him to wait a bit and go after at least a minor award. He’s very fair exhibitioner standard, I’d say – and as the family fortunes have turned out the money would probably be useful. Not that in cash terms open scholarships and exhibitions are of much account nowadays, as you know.’

  ‘Certainly I do. And I fear the Hayeses’ finances may just be at a tricky level for getting any decent grant from the public purse. I suppose, Head Master, we might find something ourselves to help the boy through.’

  ‘My dear Syson, anything of the kind that you proposed would certainly be approved at once. Of course, inquiries would have to be made. It’s conceivable that there are affluent relations not too far away.’

  ‘As a solicitor the lad’s father is presumably a gonner for good.’

  ‘I fear so. The Law Society tries to be lenient when such disasters come along. When a man loses first his liberty and then his job there is an uncomfortable sense of double penalty about the thing. But you can’t get round embezzlement. The poor devil will be struck off for keeps. Another glass?’