Saving the Queen Page 7

  He bathed and went down to dinner, and his mother, who looked younger than in the spring when he had last seen her—more beautiful than he ever remembered her—gazing adoringly on her beautiful son, said that they must be practical for a moment.

  The next morning would be given over to outfitting him for Greyburn. He would need three pairs of gray flannel pants, two vests, two school blazers, a cap, sports shoes, gray woolen shirts, two school ties, socks and underwear, all of it available at Harrods.

  “They have a quite extensive store of sorts at the school and you can buy there, or order, anything else you need. Your stepfather drove up there a week ago after he got your school records from Scarsdale. The headmaster went over them very carefully. You would be going into your sophomore year at Scarsdale. The equivalent at Greyburn is the fourth form. Dr. Chase thinks you’d be better off, and happier, entering the third form. Later, in a year or two, you might be able to skip a form. But right now, you haven’t had as advanced work as the English boys of your age in Latin and French. And, of course, they’ve done a lot of English history and you’ve had none. Your stepfather decided we should take the headmaster’s advice.”

  “Was there any choice?” asked Black, rueful at repeating an entire year.

  “No, darling. There really wasn’t. Greyburn made a huge exception in taking you. Everything is very tight with the war, and in any case Greyburn has a very long line of boys waiting to get in.” Black wondered whether in Greyburn there was a very long line of boys waiting to get out; but he said nothing. The whole thought of the place—he had never been to boarding school—depressed him; he supposed he would get used to it, and his naturally high spirits, since his flight from Camp Blakey, were restored, though he was nervous at the prospect of meeting his stepfather.

  This happened at lunch; and this time, his mother slipped away.

  Sir Alec was, Black guessed, forty-five years old. What was most conspicuous at first was the formality of his dress. He could have walked directly into Westminster Abbey with that costume, Black thought, and married a princess at high noon. Even the carnation was there, and on coming into the hall, he had put aside an umbrella and a derby. He was middle-sized, and balding, with heavy glasses, a beefy face, and a trim red mustache. Black had studied, the night before in his stepfather’s study, pictures of him as a boy: on the rugger team at Greyburn, crewing at Cambridge. He had then a profusion of what must have been red hair, and he always looked solemn, as though no other pose was suitable for a gentleman to strike before a photographer. There was a picture, in a black frame, of his wife, who looked austere and rather helpless as she held, self-consciously, the hand of their ten-year-old daughter, only a few months, he deduced from the date of the inscription, before the fatal accident.

  “This is rather awkward, isn’t it?” he heard his stepfather saying. “Sit down. I have given it a lot of thought, and it occurs to me we should handle some of the practical problems first, such as how you are to address me. I expect you do not want to call me ‘Father,’ and of course I shan’t ask you to. There is, in England, a surviving tradition which permits calling one’s stepfather ‘Stepfather.’ But it is shaky, even as the bourgeois traditions of calling one’s cook ‘Cook.’ If I hadn’t been knighted, we might have experimented with your calling me ‘Mr. Sharkey.’ But ‘Sir Alec’ is, I think you would agree, uncomfortable.

  “Thus I have been driven by the process of elimination, which, incidentally, Blackford, is the secret behind most successful architecture, never mind the popular superstition that all those beautiful contrivances are born of poetic inspiration or theoretical sunbursts, to conclude that you will have to address me—brace yourself—as Alec.”

  He pronounced the syllables distastefully.

  “I never thought before now that there were uses in being christened something more formal, like ‘Algernon’ or ‘Auberon.’ Now, I have the same objection to this that you may be thinking. In the first place, I dislike precipitate informality. In the second place, I dislike it in particular when it is otherwise fitting to emphasize a relationship, one of the parties to which is subordinate—as you, necessarily, will be subordinate to me over the next few years. It is useful that terms of address should suggest such authority. And, finally, there is a hint of modernism in the arrangement, and I resist modernism in all its forms, with conviction, and indeed implacability. At the same time, if there are no alternatives, there are no alternatives. Under the circumstances, I am: Alec. Good afternoon, Blackford.”

  Black was breathless. Still, as Sir Alec sat down, he caught a trace of a smile in the studiedly dour countenance, and his whole frame—as when, tensing up again for another painful shaft of the dentist’s drill, one is told that it is all over—relaxed. Black didn’t feel he could let down his guard. Nor could he predict he would ever feel affection for his stepfather. But he felt, already, a certain … security in his presence. And no feeling at all that doing so implied any infidelity to his father.

  Sir Alec rang a bell, and a tray of sandwiches and hot soup was brought in, with a glass of milk and a half bottle of claret. He spoke at a rapid rate about war developments and asked Blackford if he had any views of his own on the matter.

  Black took a deep breath and said he did not believe the United States should intervene.

  “Well,” Sir Alec said, casting a cautious glance at Blackford, “Churchill has said to you Americans: ‘Give us the tools and we will do the job.’ That seems fair, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” said Black, electing not to recapitulate the ardent analyses of his father, that U.S. aid would necessarily lead to full U.S. participation in the war.

  “Well,” said Sir Alec after a pause, “we will have to see. Meanwhile it is not to be overruled that that madman will, in his triumphant exuberance, portage his army across the Channel, and it is by no means certain that if he tries it he won’t succeed. But that kind of talk we reserve for indoors. Outdoors we use only defiant rhetoric. Grrr!!” Black looked up at his stepfather making a most hideous face. He laughed. So did Sir Alec: long laughter, waves of relief, submerging, slowly, and forever, a web of nerves exposed.

  That afternoon they walked together, through the Tower of London, and Madame Tussaud’s, and into Westminster Abbey, and past Buckingham Palace, taking tea—Black’s first—at a Lyons, with cookies and fancy pastries of assorted kinds. Sir Alec asked for chocolates and the waitress said, “Sir, you know there aren’t any chocolates these days.” Black suspected that Sir Alec did know this, but that he had asked for them anyway, to show his American stepson how grave was the situation. Black understood, but thought that, really, he should be given credit for being almost sixteen. After all, he didn’t think a shortage of chocolates was the surest sign of a collapsed order. Though he did wonder, idly, whether Aunt Alice could be got to send him some Milky Ways to Greyburn, as she had to Camp Blakey.

  School! The day after tomorrow.

  He looked up at his stepfather—he had not yet brought himself to refer to him as “Alec,” was looking for the opportunity, and meanwhile he called him—nothing at all—

  “How big is Greyburn?” he asked suddenly.

  “Greyburn has six hundred and twenty-five boys and thirteen forms. The top four forms—the Upper School—have seventy-five boys in each form, approximately. The school was founded in the eighteenth century, under the special protection of the Duke of Caulfield, on whose estate it was built. The present Duke, who is all of twenty-three years old, is ex officio the chairman of the board of trustees. It has supplied as high a percentage of graduates to Oxford and Cambridge in the past century as any school in the kingdom. I finished in 1914, just in time to fight in a very long war, from which, for reasons I cannot understand, I emerged not only intact, but positively roaring with health, which made me hugely conspicuous alongside my emaciated and mutilated classmates who went up with me to Cambridge in 1919.

  “Greyburn is a rigid school, insists on the highest stand
ards, academic and other, and has means, mostly painful, of forcing the boys to meet these standards. I don’t know the present chap, Dr. Chase, at all—met him for the first time when I went over there to discuss you. He was headmaster of a grammar school before going to Greyburn, and wrote a research study on medieval pedagogy, for which he received an advanced degree. Cold fish. But the trustees think highly of him, and now that the whole bloody country is regimented, the regimentation at Greyburn doesn’t strike one as all that unusual. It will take you time to get used to it. But if you are like most of the others, you will find it an exhilarating experience. I did, though of course I had my unhappy moments. You get one weekend a term to come home, and we are permitted, after you have been there for ten weeks, to take you out three Saturday afternoons, provided you have not been ‘confined’; and we may attend—again after your initial ten weeks—any school game and have tea later on the grounds. You look fit for the junior teams, but first you’ll have to do something to bring order to your rather chaotic academic background.”

  “Why ‘chaotic’? Scarsdale High School has a very good reputation,” Blackford said defensively.

  “Nothing personal. All other educational systems appear chaotic alongside one’s own. No doubt Scarsdale High School would find a matriculant from Greyburn dreadfully in need of adjustments. By the way, you will find an almost uniform ignorance, at Greyburn, of the causes, and ideals, of the American War of Independence.”

  That night all three had dinner, and Sir Alec announced, just before the soup was served, that they must hurry, because he had three tickets to a film being shown down Oxford Street, within walking distance. It was a thriller, in which Walter Pidgeon very nearly shot Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and the anguished disappointment felt by Black’s fellow viewers at Walter Pidgeon’s failure to squeeze the trigger when the hairline neatly and lethally bisected the Führer’s head was emotionally overwhelming in the packed theater. To think of it! That one man, with one rifle, might have spared England the ordeal into which she was entered. After the movie ended, Black, seated by the aisle, rose and stepped automatically out. His mother grabbed him by the arm. The audience was risen and motionless, while the loudspeakers gave out the majestic chords of “God Save the King.”

  Six

  As Blackford cheered on the team, he suddenly realized that what had been, up until only a week or so ago—at last Saturday’s game—purely perfunctory cheers for the home team were now genuine. He really did want his school to win the game against Harrow, and he wondered why. He wondered, to begin with, how he had survived the first week, and the nights, when in his solitary cubicle, his pillow over his head so that he would not be heard by his neighbors through the flimsy plyboard partitions, he wept, longing for his mother, his friends at Scarsdale, and above all for the easygoing liberties that had been taken from him as abruptly as if he had been clapped into prison.

  He could not believe the supervision. The detailed concern. When, on the first morning, while still brushing his teeth in his dressing gown, he saw his classmates, similarly dressed, leaving the communal lavatory with its forty washbasins, queuing by a master before whom they opened their mouths wide and exhibited both sides of their hands, Blackford thought he must there and then laugh, cry, or flee. He did none of these, but in showing his hands and opening his mouth, he inaugurated that cultivated air of discreet defiance which had made him now, after only eight weeks, something of a celebrity.

  He found, for instance, the cloying repetition of the word “sir” obsequious to the point of debasement. “You know, Aunt Alice,” he had written from the depths of despair on the fourth day, “around here you are supposed to say sir every other word, practically. I’ll give you an example. You want the butter, and it’s sitting in front of the master. You’re supposed to say, Sir? Please, sir. Would you pass the butter, sir? Well, as they say here, I’m bloody well not going to do that c-r-a-p.”

  He wondered, worriedly, whether, at this safe distance, he wasn’t taking cowardly liberties—using an obscenity in a letter to his aunt. He reckoned correctly that in her absorbing concern for him she would not pause to reproach him on this count. She wrote: “My darling Blacky: You mustn’t be defiant, dear. The English are after all a different people from us, and they have their own customs. Remember, dear, they didn’t ask you to go to their school, you asked (through your stepfather) to go, and they let you in, so it’s only fair to do it their way. Besides, you will be a lot happier.”

  But Blackford found himself happiest when skating breezily along the edges of defiance. (“Would you pass the butter?… sir?”) After the first week his reliable spirits began, after measured decompressions, to revive. He was, in any case, desperately busy, from 6:45 A.M., when the bell in the cold-cold antiseptic dormitory clanged and the boys in dressing gowns rushed down to the lavatory, until 9 P.M., when a master at one end of the dormitory recited the psalm De Profundis, and the boys gave the responses in Latin, read out in the dim light of their cubicles, from a printed card permanently tacked to the inside of the door of the dresser which opened so that, lying on their beds, they could discern the tenpoint print; whereupon all the lights went, implacably, out.

  Blackford’s first concern was his academic work. He had no trouble in English or in history—it was as easy to learn about the Plantagenet Kings as about the Founding Fathers; in fact, he found the Kings, on casual acquaintance, less confusing and (he did not divulge this) rather more exciting. In beginning French he found he could easily stay abreast of his class, and in mathematics he showed the flair that later would put him at the top percentile in his college aptitude tests. Geography was a bore—simply another subject—and his quick memory was wonderfully useful to him.

  His trouble was with Latin. Although he had had a year of it at Scarsdale and was only in second-year Latin at Greyburn, here the boys were already reading Caesar, and Blackford found Caesar utterly impenetrable. The master, Mr. Simon, was a veteran of generations of ineptitude in teaching Latin and reacted to student mystification with a blend of scorn and tyranny. A grizzled man in his late fifties, with sideburns and spectacles. Mr. Simon—one of the boys told Blackford—had many years ago proposed to a lady in Latin and, on finding her response ungrammatical, resolved upon celibacy. Latin was his wife, and mistress, and catamite. He wooed his muse with seductive little mannerisms he had over the years satisfied himself were endearing to young boys, and marvelous instruments of a successful pedagogy.

  Blackford began on the wrong side of Mr. Simon by suggesting that, as an American, he should, by all rights, be permitted to continue to inflect Latin nouns according to the American sequence rather than the English sequence—on the grounds that to change now from nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative to the English sequence would terribly and prejudicially confuse him.

  The other twenty boys in the class were awed into silence. Only the older boy in the back row, a fifth-former and prefect who, because he too was behind, was required to take third-form Latin with his juniors, dared to speak out.

  “Sir, that’s a pretty good point.”

  The boys all laughed, because he was the other American; though in fact he had begun Latin, last year, at Greyburn, and had been trained ab initio in the English sequence.

  Mr. Simon replied: “You will have harder adjustments to make, Oakes, than slightly to rearrange the order of noun inflections. I suggest you resolve to learn it the right way, or, I suppose, I had better say”—and he smiled, lifting his hands to tug on the lapels of his academic robe, the characteristic posture when he thought himself about to say something withering or amusing—“the English way.”

  “Hear, hear!” the boys said, at once docile and chauvinistic.

  “Do you also conjugate the verbs differently in America, Oakes? Another habit acquired from the Indians?”

  The boys roared. Oakes flushed, doodling on his pad, conscious that everyone was looking at him, unlearned in the artifices of appearing ind
ifferent. Mr. Simon then delivered what Blackford came to recognize as his favorite homily: the necessity of learning Latin nouns and their declensions, and Latin verbs and their conjugations, particularly the irregular verbs, by repeating them to oneself in every circumstance.

  “Don’t put the subject out of your mind when you leave the classroom. Think about a difficult verb when you are walking along the corridors between classes. When you are having your tea. When you are running out to the playing field. Remember: Qui cogitat quod debet facere, solet conficere quod debet facere.” Mr. Simon beamed as he attempted to dittify his maxim in English: “Those who think about their duty / Are those who end by doing their duty!”

  At tea that afternoon—the sole, blissful repast at which the boys were unsupervised, and their banter unheard by a presiding master—Blackford remarked to the boy opposite, who was also in the class, that Simon was a pompous ass, and the boy replied in the public school drawl (one Blackford was determined would never be allowed to creep into his own speech) that how else could he have achieved such high standing at Greyburn? The veteran Greyburnian remarked: “Simon’s been here practically since he left his blubbing mother’s arms. He used to recite an original poem in Latin at Class Day exercises, until five years ago when he just plain overdid it—he recited thirty-two verses. When Dr. Chase came in, he changed the ceremony, moving Mr. Simon back to the ‘Academic Reminiscences’ hour scheduled the day before, which is voluntary.… He’s always in a bad humor now, because he really thinks that, though he is tops in Latin, he really ought to be a general!”

  The boys laughed. “He was a lieutenant in the last war. He’ll tell you about it.”

  “He’ll tell you about it for three hours, if you don’t watch yourself,” another boy chimed in, reaching over Blackford for the jam.