The Citadel (6 page)

Five minutes later he ascended the incline of Bank Street, walked into the school and, having inquired his way of the janitor, he found himself outside the classroom of Standard 1. He knocked at the door, entered.

It was a large detached room, well ventilated, with a fire burning at one end. All the children were under seven and, as it was the afternoon break when he entered, each was having a glass of milk – part of an assistance scheme introduced by the local branch of the MWU. His eyes fell upon the mistress at once. She was busy writing out sums upon the blackboard, her back towards him, and she did not immediately observe him. But suddenly she turned round.

She was so different from the intrusive female of his indignant fancy that he hesitated. Or perhaps it was the surprise in her brown eyes which made him immediately ill at ease. He flushed and said:

‘Are you Miss Barlow?’

‘Yes.’ She was a slight figure in a brown tweed skirt, woollen stockings and small stout shoes. His own age, he guessed, no, younger – about twenty-two. She inspected him, a little doubtful, faintly smiling, as though, weary of infantile arithmetic, she welcomed distraction on this fine spring day. ‘Aren’t you Doctor Page’s new assistant?’

‘That’s hardly the point,’ he answered stiffly, ‘though, as a matter of fact, I am Doctor Manson. I believe you have a contact here. Idris Howells. You know his brother has measles.’

There was a pause. Her eyes, though questioning now, were persistently friendly. Brushing back untidy hair she answered:

‘Yes, I know.’

Her failure to take his visit seriously was sending his temper up again.

‘Don’t you realise it’s quite against the rules to have him here?’

At his tone her colour rose and she lost her air of comradeship. He could not help thinking how clear and fresh her skin was, with a tiny brown mole, exactly the colour of her eyes, high on her right cheek. She was very fragile in her white blouse, and ridiculously young. Now she was breathing rather quickly, yet she spoke slowly:

‘Mrs Howells was at her wit’s end. Most of the children here have had measles. Those that haven’t are sure to get it sooner or later. If Idris had stopped off he’d have missed his milk which is doing him such a lot of good.’

‘It isn’t a question of his milk,’ he snapped. ‘He ought to be isolated.’

She answered stubbornly. ‘I have got him isolated – in a kind of way. If you don’t believe me look for yourself.’

He followed her glance. Idris, aged five, at a little desk all by himself near the fire, was looking extraordinarily pleased with life. His pale blue eyes goggled contentedly over the rim of his milk mug.

The sight infuriated Andrew. He laughed contemptuously, offensively.

‘That may be your idea of isolation. I’m afraid it isn’t mine. You must send that child home at once.’

Tiny points of light glinted in her eyes.

‘Doesn’t it occur to you that I’m the mistress of this class? You may be able to order people about in more exalted spheres. But here it’s my word that counts.’

He glared at her, with raging dignity.

‘You’re breaking the law! You can’t keep him here. If you do I’ll have to report you.’

A short silence followed. He could see her hand tighten on the chalk she held. That sign of her emotion added to his anger against her, yes, against himself. She said disdainfully:

‘Then you had better report me. Or have me arrested. I’ve no doubt it will give you immense satisfaction.’

Furious, he did not answer, feeling himself in an utterly false position. He tried to rally himself, raising his eyes, attempting to beat down hers, which now sparkled frostily towards him. For an instant they faced each other, so close he could see the soft beating in her neck, the gleam of her teeth between her parted lips. Then she said:

‘There’s nothing more, is there?’ She swung round tensely to the class. ‘Stand up, children, and say: “Good morning, Doctor Manson. Thank you for coming.”’

A clatter of chairs as the infants rose and chanted her ironic bidding. His ears were burning as she escorted him to the door. He had an exasperating sense of discomfiture and added to it the wretched suspicion that he had behaved badly in losing his temper while she had so admirably controlled hers. He sought for a crushing phrase, some final intimidating repartee. But before that came the door closed quietly in his face.

Manson, after a furious evening during which he composed and tore up three vitriolic letters to the medical officer of health, tried to forget about the episode. His sense of humour, momentarily lost in the vicinity of Bank Street, made him impatient with himself because of his display of petty feeling. Following a sharp struggle with his stiff Scots pride, he decided he had been wrong, he could not dream of reporting the case, least of all to the ineffable Griffiths. Yet, though he made the attempt, he could not so easily dismiss Christine Barlow from his mind.

It was absurd that a juvenile school-mistress should so insistently occupy his thoughts or that he should be concerned by what she might think of him. He told himself it was a stupid case of injured pride. He knew that he was shy and awkward with women. Yet no amount of logic could alter the fact that he was now restless and a little irritable. At unguarded moments, as for example when he was falling off to sleep, the scene in the classroom would flash back to him with renewed vividness and he would find himself frowning in the darkness. He still saw her, crushing the chalk, her brown eyes warm with indignation. There were three small pearly buttons on the front of her blouse. Her figure was thin and agile, with a firm economy of line which spoke to him of much hard running and dauntless skipping in her childhood. He did not ask himself if she were pretty. It was enough that she stood, spare and living, before the screen of his sight. And his heart would turn unwillingly, with a kind of sweet oppression which he had never known before.

A fortnight later he was walking down Chapel Street in a fit of abstraction when he almost bumped into Mrs Bramwell at the corner of Station Road. He would have gone on without recognising her. She, however, stopped at once, and hailed him, dazzling him with a smile.

‘Why, Doctor Manson! The very man I’m looking for. I’m giving one of my little social evenings tonight. You’ll come, won’t you?’

Gladys Bramwell was a corn-haired lady of thirty-five, showily dressed, with a full figure, baby blue eyes and girlish ways. Gladys described herself romantically as a man’s woman. The gossips of Drineffy used another word. Doctor Bramwell doted upon her and it was rumoured that only his blind fondness prevented him from observing her more than skittish preoccupation with Doctor Gabell, the ‘coloured’ doctor from Toniglan.

As Andrew scanned her he sought hurriedly for an evasion.

‘I’m afraid, Mrs Bramwell, I can’t possibly get away tonight.’

‘But you must, silly. I’ve got such nice people coming. Mr and Mrs Watkins from the mine and,’ a conscious smile escaped her, ‘Doctor Gabell from Toniglan – oh, and I almost forgot, the little school-teacher Christine Barlow.’

A shiver passed over Manson.

He smiled foolishly.

‘Why, of course I’ll come, Mrs Bramwell. Thank you very much for asking me.’ He managed to sustain her conversation for a few moments until she departed. But for the remainder of the day he could think of nothing but the fact that he was going to see Christine Barlow again.

Mrs Bramwell’s ‘ evening’ began at nine o’clock, the late hour being chosen out of consideration for the medical gentlemen who might be detained at their surgeries. It was, in fact, a quarter past nine when Andrew finished his last consultation. Hurriedly, he splashed himself in the surgery sink, tugged back his hair with the broken comb, and hastened to The Retreat. He reached the house which, belying its idyllic name, was a small brick dwelling in the middle of the town, to find that he was the last arrival. Mrs Bramwell, chiding him brightly, led the way, followed by her five guests and her husband, into supper.

It was a cold meal, spread out on paper doyleys on the fumed oak table. Mrs Bramwell prided herself upon being a hostess, something of a leader in style in Drineffy, which permitted her to shock public opinion by ‘doing herself up,’ and her idea of ‘making things go’ was to talk and laugh a great deal. She always inferred that her background previous to her marriage to Doctor Bramwell had been one of excessive luxury. Tonight, as they sat down she glittered:

‘Now! Has everybody got what they want.’

Andrew, breathless from his haste, was at first deeply embarrassed. For a full ten minutes he dared not look at Christine. He kept his eyes lowered, overpoweringly conscious of her sitting at the far end of the table between Doctor Gabell, a dark complexioned dandy in spats, striped trousers and pearl pin, and Mr Watkins, the elderly scrubby-headed mine manager, who in his blunt fashion was making much of her. At last, driven by a laughing allusion from Watkins: ‘Are ye still my Yorkshire lass, Miss Christine?’ he lifted his head jealously, looked at her, found her so intimately there, in a soft grey dress with white at the neck and cuffs, that he was stricken and withdrew his eyes lest she should read them.

Defensively, scarcely knowing what he said, he began to devote himself to his neighbour, Mrs Watkins, a little wisp of a woman who had brought her knitting.

For the remainder of the meal he endured the anguish of talking to one person when he longed to talk to another. He could have sighed with relief when Doctor Bramwell, presiding at the top of the table, viewed the cleared plates benevolently and made a napoleonic gesture.

‘I think, my dear, we have all finished. Shall we adjourn to the drawing-room.’

In the drawing-room, when the guests were variously disposed – chiefly upon the three-piece suite – it was plain that music was expected in the order of the evening. Bramwell beamed fondly on his wife and led her to the piano.

‘What shall we oblige with first tonight, my love.’ Humming, he fingered amongst the music on the stand.

‘“Temple Bells”,’ Gabell suggested. ‘I never get tired of that one, Mrs Bramwell.’

Seating herself on the revolving music stool Mrs Bramwell played and sang while her husband, one hand behind his back, the other advanced as in the motion of snuff-taking, stood beside her and deftly turned the sheets. Gladys had a full contralto voice, bringing all her deep notes up from her bosom with a lifting motion of her chin. After the ‘ Love Lyrics’ she gave them ‘ Wandering By’, and ‘Just a Girl’.

There was generous applause. Bramwell murmured absently, in a pleased undertone: ‘ She’s in fine voice tonight.’

Doctor Gabell was then persuaded to his feet. Fiddling with his ring, smoothing his well-oiled but still traitorous hair, the olive skinned buck bowed affectedly towards his hostess, and, clasping his hands well in front of him, bellowed fruitily, ‘Love in Sweet Seville’. Then, as an encore, he gave, ‘ Toreador’.

‘You sing those songs about Spain with real go, Doctor Gabell,’ commented the kindly Mrs Watkins.

‘It’s my Spanish blood, I suppose,’ laughed Gabell modestly, as he resumed his seat.

Andrew saw an impish glint in Watkins’s eye. The old mine manager, a true Welshman, knew music, had last winter helped his men to produce one of Verdi’s more obscure operas and now, dormant behind his pipe, was enjoying himself enigmatically. Andrew could not help thinking that it must afford Watkins deep amusement to observe these strangers to his native town affecting to dispense culture in the shape of worthless, sentimental ditties. When Christine smilingly refused to perform he turned to her with a twitch to his lips.

‘You’re like me, I reckon, my dear. Too fond of the piano to play it.’

Then the high light of the evening shone. Doctor Bramwell took the centre of the stage. Clearing his throat, he struck out one foot, threw back his head, placed his hand histrionically inside his coat. He announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen. “ The Fallen Star”. A Musical Monologue.’ At the piano, Gladys started to vamp a sympathetic accompaniment and Bramwell began.

The recitation, which dealt with the pathetic vicissitudes of a once famous actress now come to dire poverty, was glutinous with sentiment and Bramwell gave it with soulful anguish. When the drama rose Gladys pressed bass chords. When the pathos oozed she tinkled on the treble. As the climax came, Bramwell drew himself up, his voice breaking on the final line, ‘ There she was …’ a pause, ‘starving in the gutter …’ a long pause, ‘ only a fallen star!’

Little Mrs Watkins, her knitting fallen to the floor, turned damp eyes towards him.

‘Poor thing, poor thing! Oh, Doctor Bramwell, you always do that most beautiful.’

The arrival of the claret-cup created a diversion. By this time it was after eleven o’clock and, on the tacit understanding that anything following Bramwell’s effort would be sheer anticlimax, the party prepared to break up. There were laughter, polite expressions of thanks and a movement towards the hall. As Andrew pulled on his coat, he reflected miserably that he had not exchanged a word with Christine all night.

Outside, he stood at the gate. He felt that he must speak to her. The thought of the long wasted evening, in which he had meant so easily, so pleasantly, to put things right between them, weighed on him like lead. Though she had not seemed to look at him, she had been there, near him in the same room and he had kept his eyes doltishly upon his boots. Oh, Lord! he thought wretchedly, I’m worse than the fallen star. I’d better get home and go to bed.

But he did not. He remained there, his pulse racing suddenly as she came down the steps and walked towards him, alone. He gathered all his strength and stammered:

‘Miss Barlow. May I see you home.’

‘I’m afraid,’ she paused, ‘I’ve promised to wait for Mr and Mrs Watkins.’

His heart sank. He felt like turning away, a beaten dog. Yet something still held him. His face was pale but his chin had a firm line. The words came tumbling one upon another with a rush.

‘I only want to say that I’m sorry about the Howells affair. I came round to give a cheap exhibition of authority. I ought to be kicked – hard. What you did about the kid was splendid. I admire you for it. After all it’s better to observe the spirit than the letter of the law. Sorry to bother you with all this but I had to say it. Good night!’