Richard Temple - Patrick O’Brian

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outside it. Gay could explain books; Gay could explain dark passages. And yet in this relationship there was no striving for place, no first and second fiddle; it was a singularly sweet mutual liking, and the wearisome domination that is part of so many adult friendships was not there at all. They could speak to one another openly, with an ingenuous lack of dignity that would never come again.

      When Gay had helped him move his books they went out to a place beyond the cricket pitches called Starve-Acre, where they had the habit of sitting upon a bank in the evening sun. Richard was carving a lump of chalk into the likeness of the school porter while Gay told him of the events in his holidays, which were always filled with parties, picnics, excursions and so on, because he had a large family and his people lived in a thickly-populated part of the country – and because they were rich. Richard was deeply engrossed with the porter’s ear, but through it he heard Gay’s spirited imitation of his aunt, shrieking in a cross falsetto, ‘… a dreadfully vulgar man in a screaming bookie’s suit.’

      ‘But wasn’t that Brown’s father?’ asked Richard.

      ‘Yes. But she didn’t know it at first. Then she did.’

      ‘She didn’t mean he was really common?’

      ‘Of course she did. He is, too.’

      ‘But he’s a colonel.’

      ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

      ‘Can officers be common, Gay?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ said Gay, with conviction. ‘There are some rotten regiments, who just get the dregs …’

      He went on; but Richard, half listening and half reflecting, found that one of the props of his tentative system, that of gentility by office, was giving way. Gay was going on from the Army Service Corps and the like to bodies of his own invention, such as the Brothel Corps, and he was enjoying his own wit to a high degree when Richard interrupted him and said confidentially, ‘But I say, Gay, that’s not the same for parsons, is it?’

      ‘Oh no,’ said Gay, as earnestly as he could manage, ‘parsons are always all right, I dare say.’

       CHAPTER THREE

      He did not win any scholarship, not even the smallest; the recollection of this time arose cold and dark in his mind – the first adult, whole and irremediable unhappiness. It mingled with that of his father’s death, though this was an emotion that also overflowed into diffuse awe, agitation and excitement, as well as sorrow and dread of the void; and the visual image for both was the same. It was the cross-piece of his window, black against the shining grey of the sky, while the cold twilight filled the room behind him and all comfort drained out of it: he sat there so long on the floor gazing up in that wretched time between the examinations and the results and so long when all his worst suspicions (although they had been exaggerated to take off the curse) became the facts that he was to go to bed with; and in the same way he sat there some weeks later, in the same silent, cold, uncoloured light, during those unending hours when there were strangers in the house and his father was to be buried.

      Llewelyn Temple had been kind when the news came. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Richard bâch, but there it is. Perhaps it is all for the best. We must try not to be too disappointed.’ It was the kindest thing he had ever said, and the sudden spurt of tremulous affection that Richard had felt then had not died away in twenty years.

      Perhaps it was all for the best: it was certainly not entirely for the worst. At all events it turned out to be nothing like the terrifying fate that he had imagined. Before the new rector came to take his dead father’s place they moved to a cottage within bicycling distance of Easton Colborough, and he went to the local grammar school.

      The school at Easton had remained very much what it was when it was founded, some four hundred years before, a place of instruction for the boys of the town and the immediate countryside. Its meagre endowment had tempted no man’s cupidity, and it had neither become a minor public school nor part of the state’s system of education. It was a grammar school: the chief subject was grammar, Latin grammar, and the boys bawled their way through hic haec hoc as their predecessors had always done. The great part of the school was housed in one vast barn-like hall which had three classes in it, three separate classes with three masters and three distinguishable pandemoniums; the noise in this hall seemed to be quite chaotic, but somewhere in the din there would always be a pack of boys going through their hic haec hoc. The cobwebs in the bare rafters had stirred to this noise for centuries, and it was not likely that the school would change its ways now: in all these years it had never turned out a classical scholar of any reputation, but perhaps that had never been its intention – although up to the end of the eighteenth century it still sent a few boys on to the university. It was certainly not its intention now. Its intentions, as far as it was conscious of having any, were simple and direct: for a small fee it sold a small amount of information. It taught the boys a certain amount of Latin and a little history and geography: it prepared them for no examination, and it no longer had any notion of their going any further; it took the boys in at any age their parents saw fit to send them and it kept them until they were thought wise enough, which was usually between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. The cleverest boys might come to read Cicero or Ovid with some degree of ease, though scarcely with enjoyment, but the dull boys would learn nothing but their copy-books and the majority went off with little more than the three Rs. However, this satisfied the town; and certainly the boys were a very decent lot, upon the whole. They were far more tolerant than the boys of Grafton, and they received him without any of the inquisition or ill-treatment that he had dreaded. They formed an almost classless society, in which parents’ status was accidental and of little importance; and in this society accent counted for nothing – some of the country boys spoke broad and some of the town boys spoke with a nasal whine, but it made no odds: after a week it was imperceptible.

      In its way it was a very restful school. There were no games at all except those which the boys played by themselves for fun, and with scarcely a sigh Richard abandoned the tightly-organised ritual of cricket and football (as well as the more sophisticated delights of Grafton) and took to the ancient, common, childish games of marbles (called alleys here), conquerors and tops. He had never spun a top in his life before, but presently he learnt, being taught by a broad-faced, kind, hoarse boy, a love-child who was brought up with the son of the farm where the love-token had passed, and who looked exactly like a Flemish Boor.

      Out of the vagueness of musing recollection, while he was trying to build up the brown planes of Jocelyn’s face there came a sudden precise detailed brilliant image of the market at Easton Colborough, of himself standing there with Jocelyn and the boy who shared his desk – Ham, the posthumous son of a turncock, a mother’s boy with a girlish nature and a sweet and gentle look. It was the half-holiday, and Richard was coming from Miss Theobald’s drawing-class through the market-place, where the week-long desert was cram-packed with sheep, pigs, cattle, poultry, bright red ploughs, blue harrows, pedlars, hucksters, bone-setters and respectable long-established stalls that sold harness, saddles, brasses, girths, curry-combs and plaited whips.

      It was one of those days full of limpid air, when white clouds pass across the sky, and the light changes. They were standing on the north side of the market, between the part where the horses were and the outer range of stalls. On the right there was a flimsy trestle set out with cards of celluloid studs and cuff-links, brilliantly striped, penknives with many blades, patent glasscutters and frail inventions for slicing beans; and on the left, on the other side of the cobbled way, in a pen by himself stood an enormous horse, a bright bay Shire gelding with his mane and tail done up with scarlet ribbons, Jocelyn, the boor-like boy, stared with love and admiration at the horse; Ham and Richard, turning from the bean-slicers, looked at it without much understanding, and while they stood there the horse straddled and staled. It stared intently straight before it, and from its huge extruded mottled yard gushed a foaming jet of piss, inordinate in quantity. Jocelyn laughed, chuckled hoarsely: he was delighted. He said, ‘You ought to draw him. He would be worth drawing.’ Ham walked on, blushing; but

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