The Qirl in a Swing, Richard Adams's fourth major novel, is set, like Watership Down, in the Berkshire countryside. Yet the story could hardly be more different in content from his previous world-wide bestsellers. This is the haunting and haunted tale, set in the early 1970s, of a passionate love-affair, overwhelmingly beautiful but at the same time threatened by intimations of a frightening supernatural dimension. Alan Desland, living in the country town of Newbury, has inherited his father's business in antique and modern ceramics. An unlikely candidate for the events that are to overtake him, Alan appears a stable, prosperous and scholarly, if slightly unworldly, young man. Only one hint of the danger that lies ahead has been revealed: from adolescence he has been the unwilling, and sometimes unwitting, victim of occasional psychic experiences, whether in dreams or in his daily life. On a business visit to Copenhagen he meets Kathe Geutner, a German girl of extraordinary beauty. Their love is mutual and instantaneous. But apart from the glowing and passionate intensity of their pleasure in one another, what does Alan really know of Kathe, of her life and origins? After their marriage in Florida and return to England it is Kathe who acquires for almost nothing at a local sale the porcelain figure known as 'The Girl in a Swing' - a ceramic rarity of the greatest value. Their happiness should be complete - but it is not: as their life together is invaded by a growing fear of what has remained unspoken between them, the scene gradually darkens. Omens of impending grief follow upon one another, the Eumenides gather for vengeance, the darkest shadows close in with the awful inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is a drama which mounts in tension to a terrible and horrifying climax. (continued on back flap) ISBN 07139 1345 2 $12.95 Adams, Richard George The girl in a swing RICHARD ADAMS THE GIRL IN A SWING ALLEN LANE ALLEN LANE Penguin Books Ltd 536 King's Road London SW10 OUH First published 1980 Copyright © Richard Adams, 1980 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 0 7139 1345 2 Set in Intertype Lectura V Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd. * " Bungay, Suffolk To Rosamond, with love PREFACE THIS story is such a mixture that even upon reflection I cannot be sure of unravelling the experienced from the imagined. There seemed no point in giving Bradfield a pseudonym, since it is widely known to be unique in having a Greek theatre where plays are performed in the original Greek. There also seemed little point in disguising the fact that David Raeburn produced the Agamemnon of 1958. However, he was not assisted by either Alan Desland or Kirsten, since they, like Mr and Mrs Cook, Alan's housemaster and the other Bradfieldians mentioned, are entirely fictitious. Similarly, the localities in and near Copenhagen are real though the 'Golden Pheasant' restaurant is not. Jarl and Jytte Borgen are real and so is Per Simonsen, but Mr Hansen and his office staff are fictitious. Both Tony Redwood and Mr Steinberg are fictitious, but Lee Dubose happens to be real. And so on. Newbury, like many towns in England, has changed much during recent times, but I have written of it con amore, as I remember it, and hope I may be excused any minor anachronisms such as, for example, mention of a building which may in fact no longer be there. In my day there had been for many years an old-established china business in Northbrook Street, but I wish to emphasize that its proprietor - a lifelong friend - and staff bear no resemblance whatever to Alan Desland, Mrs Taswell and Deirdre, and certainly did not in any way suggest the story to my mind. So many people have helped me in one way or another that they might almost be said to constitute a syndicate. I thank them all most warmly, viz. my daughter Rosamond, Robert Andrewes, Alan Barrett, Jarl and Jytte Borgen, Bob Chambers, Barbara Griggs, John Guest, Reginald Haggar, Helgi Jonsson, Bob Lamming, Don Lineback, John Mallet, Janet Morgan, Per Simonsen and Claire Wrench. Special thanks are due to my wife Elizabeth, for her invaluable help on ceramics; and to my secretary, Janice Kneale, whose patience and accuracy in typing and other labours were of the greatest value. NOTE No phonetics, of course, convey the exact German inflexion, but a reader who pronounces 'Kathe' to rhyme with the English word 'later' will be near enough. Translations of the lines from German poems, etc., mentioned by Alan and Kathe (together with a very brief note on the opening of the Agamemnon) are given at the end of the book. How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can dol Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, Rivers and trees and cattle and all Over the countryside Till I look down on the garden green, Down on the roof so brown Up in the air I go flying again, Up in the air and down! ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON I ALL day it has been windy - strange weather for late July the wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible floodtide among seaweed; tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side. It ripped the purple clematis from its trellis and whirled away twigs and green leaves from the oaks at the bottom of the shrubbery. An hour ago it left the garden, but now, as evening falls, I can see it still tussling along the ridge of the downs four miles to southward. The beeches of Cottington's Clump stand out plainly, swaying in turmoil against the pale sky, though here not a breath remains to move a blade of grass: and scarcely a sound; the blackbirds silent as the grasshoppers, the crickets, within their thick, yellow-leaved holly-bush, not yet roused to their nightly chirping. Colours change in twilight. The blooms of the giant dahlias - Black Monarch and Anna Benedict - no longer glow dark-red, but loom ashen-dusky, like great, lightless lanterns tied to their stakes. The downs have come close - junipers, beeches and yews so distinct that you might imagine you could toss a stone onto the slope of Cottington's Hill. Yet this aspect, which seems an illusion, is natural, a magnification brought about by the rain-laden air. Rain will follow the wind, probably before midnight; a steady, quenching rain on the hollyhocks and lilies, the oaks and the acres of wheat and barley stretching beyond the lane. Kathe was sensitive as a dragon-fly to wind, sun and weather. On a wet evening, having opened the French windows to let in the sound and smell of the rain, she would play the piano in a gentle, melancholy largo of response to the pouring from grey clouds to the lawn and the glistening branches: so that as I came home, up the length of the garden lying easy under the summer downpour, I would recognize at one and the same time the clamour of a thrush and - it might be - a Chopin prelude. As I stepped in she would break off, smiling, raise her hands from the keys and open her arms in a magnificent gesture of warmth and welcome - the attitude of Hera or Demeter; as though both to thank me for the gift of all that lay around her and to invite - to summon - me to receive it again in her embrace. Upon such an evening our bodies, lying clasped together, would drift scarcely even glide - to harbour, almost without propulsion or guidance, down a gentle stream of pleasure, into and at length out of the smooth current, grounding at last with the faintest, mutual shuddering along their length; and then would return the sound of the rain, the smell of the wet garden outside, and on the nearby wall the moving shadows of the leaves and the quick, here-and-gone gleam of a silver sunset. How should I not weep? Last night I dreamt that I woke to hear some strange, barely audible sound from downstairs - a kind of thin tintinnabulation, like those coloured-glass bird-scarers which in my childhood were still sold for hanging up to glitter and tinkle in the garden breeze. I thought I went downstairs to the drawing-room. The doors of the china cabinets were standing open, but all the figures were in their places - the Bow Liberty and Matrimony, the Four Seasons of Neale earthenware, the Reinicke girl on her cow; yes, and she herself - the Girl in a Swing. It was from these that the sound came, for they were weeping. Their tears were falling in tiny crystals, flakes minute as grains of sand; and had covered, as with snow, the dark-green cloth of the shelves on which they stood. In these fragments their glaze and decoration had dropped away. Already some were almost unrecognizable. The collection was ruined. I fell on my knees, crying, like a child, 'Come back! O please come back!' and woke to find myself weeping in reality. I knew, of course, that nothing could be amiss with the collection, yet still I got up and went downstairs; perhaps to 10 prove to myself that there remained something for which I cared enough to walk twenty yards in the middle of the night. I took out the Copenhagen plate, with its underglaze blue wave mark, and for a time sat looking at the gilt dentil edge and Rosa Mundi spray, designed when Mozart was still in his twenties and thirty years before Napoleon sent half a million men to grief in the Russian snows. More fragile than they, it had had no part in that huge disaster - and now it had survived my own. At length, having sat for an hour and watched the first light come into the sky, I went back to bed. I suppose I cannot truthfully say that I have always loved ceramics; yet even as a small boy I took an unconscious delight and pleasure in going down to the shop; in its abundance of pretty, bright-coloured objects, better than toys; ladies and gentlemen and animals; its displays of cut-glass and forty-two-piece dinner services - Susie Cooper or Wedgwood Strawberry Hill - though in those days, of course, I did not know their names. A Goss cow or Rockingham stag could only have strayed, so I thought, from some wonderful Noah's ark full of porcelain. Indeed, I remember once, since I couldn't see it anywhere about, asking old Miss Lee where the ark was kept. 'Oh, they don't need no ark. Master Alan,' she answered. 'The flood - that's over now, you see. And God promised there won't be another, not no more there won't.' 'But -' Yet before I could point out that ordinary, wooden animals still had their arks notwithstanding, Miss Lee, with 'Be a good boy, now, and remember don't go touchin' none of 'em,' was off to serve some imperious, fur-coated customer. The prohibition on touching - which I intuitively sensed to be strict - excited rather than frustrated me, for it showed that these must indeed be valuable things. I had heard even grown-up people - customers - politely asked not to touch them: and one day, at home, I saw my mother close to tears after she had accidentally chipped the flowers on the lid of a china box on her dressing-table. 'It can be mended, dear, I'm sure it can,' she said, though I had not asked her; and then set to work to gather every smallest 11 fragment into an envelope. I knew also, without being told, that our living came from these precious, fragile wares. The shop, too, was different from all other shops in its clean, light smell - the smell of wooden packing-cases, shavings and sawdust - in its quietness and clear daylight, and the tiled floor across which the feet of Miss Lee and Miss Flitter went tip-tap, tip-tap so surely and purposefully, to produce some jug or teapot whose whereabouts they precisely knew. 'If you'd just care to step this way, 'm, I think we've got what you want down the passage.' For the passage - no ordinary passage - was very much part of the shop; frosted-paned, glass-roofed, five-tier-shelved along both walls, with cups, saucers, plates, jugs, sauce-boats, teapots and animals' drinking-bowls all in their places. A vine grew all along its length, half-concealing the roof, and it ended in a little fern-garden and a green door leading into the warehouse. Dimly I remember an old-fashioned, mahogany and glass-panelled cash desk, but this must have gone while I was still no more than three or four years old. I suppose that without thinking about it, I felt proud of the Northbrook Street shop for its uniqueness, its cleanness and myriad, faintly-glistening goods, which to me seemed precious simply because of their fragility. Nevertheless, it formed only a small part of all that made up my childhood. I did not often go there, for we did not live 'over the shop', but out at Wash Common, in those days a village more than a mile south of Newbury, above the town and the Kennet valley. The house - tile-roofed, gabled and half-timbered is called 'Bull Banks' - a whim of the original owner, who apparently knew and admired Beatrix Potter; not only, someone once told me, for the quality of her writing, but also for her early example of feminine independence against odds. I have never had or wished to have any other home. Lying awake on a warm, open-windowed night, I used to hear the distant trains shunting in Newbury station below, and the faint chiming of the town hall clock. In June the smell of azaleas or night-scented stock would steal in and away, here and gone. Sometimes a roaming mosquito might come in handy as an excuse for a little attention after lights12 out. 'Mummy, there's a buzzy biter in my room!' Or one could risk the onslaughts of the buzzy biters, get out of bed and lean at the window-sill, looking out towards Cottington's Clump on the skyline; or hope for a sight of an owl gliding silently over the midsummer haycocks in the wilderness beyond the lawn. In August the harvest moon would rise enormous on the left, its misty, Gloucester-cheese red slowly gaining to silver as it cleared the oak trees and lit the acres of sheaves in the great field on the further side of the lane. On green March evenings thrushes would shout from the tops of the silver birches along the edge of the lawn. My father would apostrophize them. 'Yes, I can hear you, and a nasty, vulgar bawling it is! Give me a good blackbird any day.' The big, half-wild garden was full of birds, to which he paid attention all the year round. In summer he would sit in a deck-chair on the lawn, the newspaper a mere pretence on his knee, his real purpose and pleasure being to watch and listen. 'There's a willow-warbler somewhere down there', he would say, pointing, when I came to tell him tea was ready. 'I can't see the chap, but I can hear him." And then he would teach me to recognize the characteristic dying fall of the song. He never used binoculars, but sometimes, putting on his glasses, would get up and make a cautious approach for a closer sight of a nuthatch, perhaps, or it might be a treecreeper in the pines beyond the rhododendrons. 'You have to be able to recognize a bird by its behaviour, my boy. As often as not you can't get a proper look at the beggar, because he's against the light, you see.' Although it infuriated him to see a bullfinch pulling buds off the prunus tree, he would not interfere with it. My sister - three years older - and I hung up bones for the tits and put out old bread and bacon-rinds for the starlings and wagtails running on the rain-pooled lawn. Once, a lesser spotted woodpecker flew full-tilt into a glass pane at one end of the verandah and died a minute later in my father's hand. I have never seen one since. During the five years I spent at school at Bradfield I would usually, towards the end of March, receive a postcard from him saying simply, 'I have heard the chiff-chaff.' 13 They say - at least, Thomas Hughes says, and various people have been saying it ever since - that if you don't want to be knocked about at a public school you have to be able to stick up for yourself, but I can't say I found it so, particularly. During my time at Bradfield both headmasters (for at the end of my second year there was a change) were humane men, setting little store by severity, and from them, on the whole, both staff and boys took their tone. But anyway boys have, I think, a kind of natural respect for consistency of behaviour and the faculty of self-adjustment. Certainly an aggressive or self-opinionated boy will need to be able either to stick up for himself or else to endure others' dislike or contempt. But one who makes no particular claims and whom others perceive to be content to comply with convention and live his own inoffensive life, is usually, in my experience, taken at his own valuation and left in peace, with no need to resort to any self-defence except that of his natural dignity. At any rate, it was so with me. I passed a quiet, uneventful five years, and although I made one or two friends, felt no particular desire to keep up with them after I left. They clearly felt the same of me. I see now that I lacked both the warmth and the assertiveness to lodge arrows in others' hearts, and indeed it did not occur to me to try. I simply took people as I found them and left it at that. During the summer term at Bradfield there were three halfholidays a week. Cricket was not compulsory after the end of one's second year and one was free to roam the local countryside, with or without a bicycle. To be alone suited me, and I gained official approval for my ways by going in for wild flowers and bird photography, once winning a prize in the annual scientific exhibition with a small display of my better pictures. I remember a lucky one of a heron alighting on its nest, which attracted praise from several of the staff. For organized games I had neither taste nor aptitude, though I did get my colours for fencing. The sabre meant little to me, but in the more delicate, precise discipline of foil and epee I found satisfaction and even delight. The masked opponent, reciprocal rather than adverse, the rectangle of alert judges, the metallic slither and tap of the blades, the sudden, irrupt14 ing cry of 'Stop!', followed by the umpire's detailed resume and adjudication: these, controlled, formal and dignified, comprised for me all that a sport should be. Swimming, too, I greatly enjoyed. I was never a competitive swimmer, but came to love the solitude and rhythm of unhurriedly covering a long distance in the same way as one might go for a walk. On fine summer mornings I often used to get up at six for the pleasure of strolling down through the marshes and swimming half a mile in the almost-deserted bath: no sound penetrating the splash and tumble of water against the ear; no disturbance of the regular accord of limbs and breathing. Coming out, I sometimes used to indulge the fancy that I had actually made - created - the swim, so that it was now standing, like a wood-carving or painting, in some impalpable, personal pantheon. Chess I learned, and put a fair amount of effort into, but contract bridge, more social and gregarious, had little appeal. One might almost say that I studied to be a nonentity at Bradfield, leaving unsought, through a kind of natural diffidence, any opportunity to distinguish myself or become a 'blood'. Certainly I rejected the only real chance that came my way of showing myself to possess an unusual gift. It happened in this way. During my third summer - that is to say, when I was sixteen and, having taken my '0' levels the previous year, had begun to specialize in modern languages - one of the assistant science masters, a man named Cook, let it be known that he was interested in extra-sensory perception and was looking for volunteers to help him to carry out some experiments. Naturally there was a fair flow of applicants, all but a few of whom Cook turned down. Probably he was afraid less that his leg would be pulled by hoaxers than that over-enthusiasm would mislead people into tackling the business without proper detachment and in an un-scientific way. He was after cool heads and turnip temperaments - boys not likely to act the prima donna or make an ego-trip out of anything unusual which might happen to show up. Although I was now officially a fifth-form modern linguist I still had, in my spare time, a fair amount to do with the 15 scientific side, on account of my natural history activities. It had not occurred to me to volunteer for Cook's scheme, but he himself tackled me one day in the labs, and, as they say, twisted my arm. 'I need steady, unexcitable people', he said. 'You might be just the chap, Desland.' It sounded harmless enough and no particular trouble. I agreed to oblige him, though without any particular enthusiasm. I remember little about the tests with numbered cards, dice and so on. I don't think they yielded anything much. In any case Cook was reticent about his actual findings - rather like a doctor who questions you on your symptoms but carefully shows no reaction to your answers. Perhaps he had been cautioned by the headmaster to see that boys didn't become excited or 'silly' over the business. However that may be, I had already become rather bored with the whole thing when one Friday he asked me to tea at his home the following afternoon, together with a boy in 'B' House, whom I knew slightly, by the name of Sharp. Cook's wife, a strikingly pretty girl who took an active part in College life and was much admired by the older boys, gave us an excellent tea and made herself most agreeable. While she was clearing it away, Cook continued chatting. Evidently he was waiting for her to rejoin us, for as soon as she had done so he said that he'd asked us to come because he was keen to try one or two experiments of a rather different kind. 'I don't know whether you've ever heard of this,' he said, 'but one school of thought has it that there are people with a kind of extra-sensory perception - or at any rate, some sort of hitherto-unexplained faculty - which tends to come out more strongly in connection with anything sinister or lethal - anything evil, if you like. You know, Gaelic second sight into disaster and all that.' He went on to tell us about an eighteenth-century 'murder diviner', who apparently is said to have enabled the authorities to follow two criminals to Marseilles, where they were arrested for a crime committed in Paris. I have never felt any inclination to find out more about this case and all I 16 can remember of it is the little that Cook told us that day. 'Anyway,' he concluded, smiling, 'I'm not going to ask either of you to divine a murder, so don't worry. What I've got in mind is something completely harmless. Perhaps you wouldn't mind waiting in the next room for just a short time, Desland, while we get to work on Master Sharp.' Between five and ten minutes later Sharp came in to call me back. In reply to my raised eyebrows he whispered, 'Absolute balls. Still, decent tea, wasn't it? To say nothing of Ma Cook.' He returned with me into the drawing-room, where the first thing I saw was a row of five identical lab. beakers standing in a row on the table, each half-full of a colourless liquid. Cook did his usual piece about banishing volition, making the mind a blank and so on, and then said, 'Now, Desland, four of these are full of water and one of sulphuric acid. My wife's going to drink from each in turn. She doesn't know which is which any more than you do. Speak up if you get the idea that she's starting on the acid. If you don't I shall, of course.' There was nothing at all dramatic about what followed. I had no odd premonitions, no visions of Mrs Cook writhing in agony or anything of that sort. She poured some of the first beaker into a tumbler and drank it, and as she was pouring another dose out of the second I had a vague but perfectly straightforward feeling that it would be better if she let it alone; rather as one feels when someone is about to open a window which will let in the rain, or put a hot dish down on a polished table. I waved my hand rather hesitantly and said, 'Er -.' 'That's right,' said Cook at once. 'Now, can you tell me what exactly came into your mind, Desland?' I replied, 'Nothing, sir. Just - well - nothing, honestly.' 'But is it really sulphuric acid, sir?1 asked Sharp. Cook tore off a strip of blue litmus and dipped it into the beaker. It turned red as smartly as anyone could wish. 'Would you care to try it again, Desland?' he asked. I felt no particular pleasure or satisfaction in what had happened 17 and was already beginning to wonder how to persuade Sharp to keep quiet about it in College; but I could hardly refuse, so I went outside again while Cook set the thing up. This second time I felt completely bored and switched-off, and simply sat enjoying the sight of Mrs Cook as she bent forward to pick up the various beakers. In fact I had, in an odd way, forgotten what we were all supposed to be doing, when I suddenly realized that she had just drunk from the fifth and last beaker. I suppose I must have shown some sort of alarm, because Cook immediately jumped up and put a hand on my shoulder. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'They were all water that time. I played a trick on you; but you - or whatever it is - weren't taken in, were you? Very interesting, Desland. Can you tell us anything now about the way you felt?' 'No, I can't, sir,' I answered - much too brusquely for a boy speaking to a master, 'and if you don't mind, I'd rather not do any more just for the moment.' I had begun to have a vague feeling, first of anxiety though of what I had no idea - and secondly that Cook had no - well, I suppose no moral business to be doing this; that he was acting selfishly and irresponsibly, even though he might not be aware of it himself. It might be nothing but an experiment to him. To me, for some reason, it was turning out to be something in which I felt I didn't want to get involved any further. There was a rather awkward silence. Cook seemed at a bit of a loss. Then Mrs Cook took matters upon herself. She got up, stood beside my chair and laid the palm of her hand gently on my forehead. 'You feel all right, Desland, don't you?' she asked. 'There's nothing to get upset about, you know. This is quite a recognized phenomenon and one day it'll be fully understood. You needn't worry about it at all.' The soft firmness of one of her breasts - she was wearing a thin, pale-blue twin-set, I remember - just touched the side of my face and I could smell her light, warm femininity; scented soap and the faintest trace of fresh sweat. I felt myself erect - instantly and fully, as a boy does - and became 18 horribly embarrassed. I could not tell whether or not anyone else had noticed. I stood up, coughing, and set things to rights under cover of taking my handkerchief out of my trousers pocket and unnecessarily blowing my nose. Mrs Cook looked into my eyes and smiled as though we had been entirely alone. 'Do you think you could do one more experiment - just for me, Desland?' she asked. 'Something quite different? You needn't if you don't want to, but I hope you will.' At that moment I became as good as certain that Mrs Cook had been the moving spirit behind this business all along and that Cook, though not indifferent, was really acting in the nature of her agent. I also knew - though I could not have put it into words - that she enjoyed using her sexual attractiveness to get her own way. I felt altogether out of my depth: on the one hand excited and flattered by her attention, the first such experience I had ever known; on the other, oppressed by a cloudy notion that, although her interest could not exactly be called frivolous or trifling, she nevertheless had not the right to be putting this sort of pressure on me, having no more idea than I of what the cost might be. The difference between us was that I was nervous - even afraid - and she wasn't. She was being unthinkingly selfish from habit, like a spoilt child, or an Oriental princess urging a young courtier to attempt some dangerous feat purely for her titillation and amusement. Naturally I agreed - I could hardly do anything else - and she began to tell me about Professor Gilbert Murray's strange ability - which, she said, he had always refused to exercise except as a pastime - to perceive and identify some idea or object which his family and friends had agreed to concentrate upon while he was out of the room. This certainly struck me as less sinister than a dose of sulphuric acid, and I went outside for the third time, leaving the other three to concert their subject. This exercise stepped off into a total frost. I had no idea how to go about the task that had been thrust upon me whether to gaze into the eyes of the other three in search of some 'message', or just to look at the floor and wait for in19 spiration; whether to speak my thoughts aloud and let them lead me on, or simply to stand in a tranced silence and await the gleam of revelation. Nothing happened. 'Daffodils', I remember, turned out to be their first idea, but I cannot recall the second. I had already caught Sharp's eye in a silent appeal for help and departure, when Mrs Cook said she thought we might have one last try. This time I came back into the room feeling foolish and embarrassed, but at the same time relieved and more relaxed. The silly thing didn't work, thank goodness, and now they would let me alone. There would be time to go down to the Pang and throw a fly for twenty minutes before College tea (which you had to attend, whether or not you had been out to tea with a master). As I sat down, my glance fell on a rectangular flower-bed outside the window and a garden fork which had been left sticking in the newly-dug ground. Without knowing why, I continued looking at the fork. At first it was very much as though I were observing a goldfinch on a gorse-bush, or a beetle on a patch of turf. That is to say, the fork became the entire object of my attention and interest, to the exclusion of all around it, and I took in its e^ery detail. Then, with a kind of clammy thickness, repulsion and fear came down upon me like the folds of a collapsing tent. My feelings, so far as I can remember them, might be compared to those of some war-time housewife who, having begun by being mildly intrigued to see through the window a policeman approaching her door and carrying a telegram, suddenly realizes what this must mean. I seemed to be standing alone in a deserted silence. The harmless fork became a horror the mere sight of which filled me with choking nausea. The garden beneath it I now knew to contain the bodies of innocent, helpless victims, whose wanton murders nullified the sunlight and flowers, nullified Mrs Cook and her pretty breasts and cool hands. The worms - the worms were coming, wriggling, slimy and voracious, to fill my mouth. The world, I now saw clearly, was nothing but a dreary place, a mean, squalid dump, whose inhabitants were condemned for ever to torment each other for no reason and no purpose but the pleasure of cruelty: a wicked Eden, its equivalent of 20 Adam a foul travesty whose very name was a jeering pun on that of God's incarnate purity and compassion. Indeed these, I now saw plainly, were nothing but lies - mere figments to delude girls like Mrs Cook until their bodies could be clutched, strangled, defiled and buried; a travesty whose name was I fell to the floor, vomiting my tea over the carpet, battering blindly with my fists and choking out one word: 'Christie! Christie!' Cook came out of it very well. He yanked me to my feet in a moment and supported me into the fresh air, mopping me up with some sort of towel or cloth which he must have snatched up on our way through the hall. 'Come on, Desland,' he said, 'pull yourself together!' He tore up some ragwort and held the crushed, pungent leaves against my nose. 'How many telegraph wires are there up there? Come on, count them! Count them to me, out loud!' My teeth were chattering and I felt cold, but I did as he said. When we got back indoors Sharp had gone and Mrs Cook had cleared up the mess. I could see that she had been crying. She said, 'I'm most terribly sorry, Desland. Will you forgive me?' This took me aback, for I had been feeling - as one does at sixteen - that I was the one to blame. It was I who had displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting with most admired disorder. I believe I tried to say something to this effect, though I can't exactly remember. When I had rinsed out my mouth and more or less cleaned myself up with T.C.P. and warm water. Cook walked back with me to College. After a bit I said, 'Was that - you know - what you were all thinking about, sir?' 'Yes, of course,' replied Cook shortly, in the tone of someone who wants a subject dropped at once. 'Entirely my fault.' (It wasn't, of course, and I knew it.) He pulled a stalk of foxtail grass out of the bank, chewed it for about half a minute and then said, 'Look, Desland, you've evidently got some unusual sort of - I don't know gift or faculty or something. Now, listen - I strongly advise 21 you to let it alone. Don't ever try to do anything like this again, do you see? I can only say I'm extremely sorry to have let you in for it. Sharp's promised my wife that he'll say nothing to anyone and I think you'd be well-advised to do the same. We'll consider the whole matter as closed and done with. No one's going to hear anything from me, I can assure you.' I felt grateful to him. It did not occur to me that both the headmaster and my parents, if they had known, would have thought him and not me to blame, nor that I had it in my power to make things awkward for him. I readily gave him my word to keep silent. However, the incident didn't remain altogether hushed up. I still felt queasy, faint and cold, and that evening after tea I went up to the house matron. She found nothing worse than a distinctly sub-normal temperature, but kept me in bed the next day and gave me a lecture about getting my feet wet fishing. I seized on this and used it to answer such few boys in the house as bothered to inquire what had been the matter with me. All the same, Sharp must have said something, for two days later Morton, a College prefect in 'B' House who had never spoken a word to me before, stopped me coming out of Hall and said, 'Look, here, Desland, what's all this about you getting the screaming habdabs or something in Cook's drawing-room?' I had already begun to think of the whole thing as a thoroughly unfortunate and discreditable business which luckily no one knew about - rather as though I had borrowed without asking and then broken the pen or squash racquet of some other boy who had generously promised to say nothing about it. I knew I should have to give Morton some sort of answer - one could not reply to a College prefect 'What damned business is it of yours?' - but I played for time and said, 'I've no idea, I'm afraid, Morton.' 'Oh, yes, you have,' he persisted. 'Come on, what's it all about?' 'Well, it's some nonsense of Cook's,' I said, with a flash of inspiration. 'He finds what he wants to find - that every22 one who's doing these tests is psychic or telepathic, or some ruddy thing or other. The whole idea's an utter waste of time.' 'And going to tea with Ma Cook - I suppose that's a waste of time, too, is it?' asked Morton, leering. 'I don't think that calls for telepathy, really, Morton.' There was room for only one idea at a time in Morton's head. The one he had started with had now been replaced by another - or more probably, Mrs Cook had been the one he had started with; Sharp was likely to have said more about her than about me. But as a College prefect Morton could hardly discuss with a totally undistinguished fifth-former his fierce affections and thoughts of what Venus did with Mars. Snorting 'Huh! - one-track mind - like everyone else in "E" House,' he disappeared into the junior common room. Even then, this struck me as a classic example of projecting one's own proclivity on to someone else. Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand. The fact was, as I soon began to realize, that I felt regretful, and lowered in my self-respect, not only by what I thought of as my disgracefully uncontrolled and hysterical outburst in the Cooks' drawing-room, but also by my lewd reaction to Mrs Cook touching me. If I was fastidious, even puritanical, in this, there were causes originating well back in my childhood. For years past there had hovered in my tracks a kind of ambivalent familiar, at once harsh and tutelary (or so I personified him to myself in my inward fancy) - one who would close behind me tread for many years to come. What he assured me was that I was physically unattractive - ugly, not to mince words. Such at all events was my belief, and I felt it endorsed both by the mirror and by those who had to do with me. 'Such a pity he's not a prettier little boy!' I had heard an old lady say, from the other side of the French windows, one hot summer afternoon when I was six. 'And the mother such a pretty girl, too,' her companion replied. It may have been a year later, in the playground, that I hesitantly offered a toffee to the class beauty, a spoilt, curly-haired chit called Elaine Somers. 23 'Thanks, Pig-face,' she said, off-hand but not unfriendly, as she pocketed it to eat later. From the way she spoke I knew that was what they called me. I left her without a word. Years before I could understand exactly what it implied, I - a caddis larva crawling on the river-bed - had built firmly into my stick-and-sand case the notion that as far as I was concerned, silken dalliance was destined to lie permanently in the wardrobe. I never kissed or embraced anyone if I could help it - not even my mother, whom of course I loved dearly - and if anyone kissed me I froze, letting them perceive that it gave me no pleasure. There was a kind of bitter pride here, like that of a lame boy who resents being given a hand. This was my fate, so I thought. Very well, I would play the ball as it lay and work out my own style of reciprocity; one that had no need of touching, either with hands or lips. Long before the unsought, spontaneous time-bomb of my first orgasm went off by night in the sleeping dormitory, nolime-tangere had become an accepted, no-longer-even-conscious part of myself. The beautiful, I think, often remain unaware of their wealth, sweeter than honey in the honeycomb, taking for granted the smooth lawns, tapestry meadows and shimmering woods in which they are privileged to wander with their own kind; idly supposing, when they give it a thought, that all but the deformed, perhaps, are equally free to roam there to any extent they please. To be in no least doubt about one's physical attractiveness - that must be strange - as strange as being an Esquimau. Yet the Esquimau does not consider himself strange. 'Twill not be noticed in him there. There the folk are all as mad as he. At sixteen I had become adapted to the handicap I believed I carried. It was something like tone-deafness, or vertigo on heights, and was perfectly livable-with. One simply avoided music - or heights. After all, it could have been enuresis, diabetes or epilepsy. Paradoxically, however, I did briefly enjoy, while still at Bradfield, what virtually no one else did - a bona fide, happy and perfectly legitimate relationship with a real, live girl only a year or two older than I; though there was nothing in the least physical or in any way incandescent about it and I did 24 not even feel any very deep sorrow when it came to an end in unhappy circumstances. During my last term - the summer term of 1958 - having already, the previous February, won an exhibition in modern languages to Wadham, I had a fairly free hand; no one minding much, as long as I observed the decencies, whether I did a great deal of work or not. I was therefore a natural for co-option into the back-stage team helping a master called David Raeburn to produce the Greek play, which that year was the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. In this capacity I turned my hand to all kinds of things, for I had come to have a real love for the Greek theatre, that unique glory and splendour of Bradfield; and although I never felt any desire to act, was always happy knocking about in it. I painted flats, repaired and furbished weapons and helmets, heard people's lines and, if requested, was not even above clipping the ivy or sweeping the terraces with a besom. One of the housemasters had a Danish wife, and this lady's niece, a rather hefty girl of about twenty, was living with them for a year to improve - or rather, to perfect, for she was already fluent and idiomatic - her English. She became known as 'the Danish pastry', for she was not particularly good-looking - a rare thing for a Dane, as I was later to discover. If she had been I should not, of course, have had a look-in, but as things were there was no competition. Kirsten had also fallen under the spell of the Greek theatre, and readily signed on for the duration under Raeburn's banner. She was handy with a Primus and had learned to make good tea. She also caused amusement by coaching Clytemnestra and Cassandra, very competently, in moving and gesturing like women. As the production developed she became more and more absorbed in it, learned to read (though not, of course, to construe) Greek (any more than I could) and at rehearsals would usually sit high up at the back of the auditorium, her large bottom uncushioned on the bare stone, from time to time whispering the lines under her breath as they were spoken below. I would sit with her, text in hand, and I can still hear the tense, suppressed excitement and delight with which she would begin, with the Watchman, "Qeovs |U,ei> atTtS r£>v8' aTraAAay^v irov