The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (4 page)

The first island was Napier Hall College and its chieftain, the Reverend Victor Hawley. This did not delay him overlong. He had quite decided what he thought about the school and its Headmaster. The one bored him and the other irritated him to a degree that reinforced his spot decision to turn his back on them, come what might.

The next island was Lane-Perkins and his father. Mr. Sermon had met Lane-Perkins' father, a loud, cheerful individual reputed to have made a fortune as a bookmaker. He neither liked nor disliked Lane-Perkins Senior. Until that moment he had been a mere parent and as such the responsibility of the Head. But now it was necessary that he should think seriously of Lane-Perkins Senior and what might result if the man made an issue of the sticking-plaster. Curiously enough the possibility did not worry Mr. Sermon very much. Surely Magistrates would understand the fearful pressures to which schoolmasters were subjected, and even if they found the charge proved, dismiss it with a caution or a trifling fine ?

Having successfully isolated these two islands of thought, Mr. Sermon plunged into the mill-race of his immediate professional future. What was he chasing? What did he really want to do? Where did he want to go and at what goal, if any, was he aiming ? He found the answers to these questions far more elusive. He knew that he badly wanted a change but not in the sense that a harassed man needs a holiday. In fact he decided there and then that he did not in the least want a holiday, for a holiday implied idleness and what he wanted was work, interesting but unexacting work, preferably with his hands or at some task that left him free to dream. To dream about what? Money? He was not interested in making a fortune. His needs were, and always had been, extremely simple and he had very little sense of possession. He had never collected anything, not even foreign stamps, had never owned a stock or a share and did not personally own the house he occupied. Thinking it

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over, Mr. Sermon decided that the only thing he did want was personal freedom, freedom not only to make the change but to live from day to day instead of from term to term, to go where he pleased when he pleased, to break out of the ring that was enclosing him and find . . . ? But here Mr. Sermon's train of thought hit the terminus buffer and went cannoning up the platform in confusion, for the truth of the matter was that Sebastian Sermon's secret heart was fully aware of what he wanted above and beyond all these generalised abstracts and Sebastian Sermon was ashamed of naming it, even to himself. The recoil headed him directly into the island represented by Sybil, his wife.

He had set out to marshal his thoughts with an express purpose and had begun this mental spring-clean with the honest intention of returning home to Sybil with a tidy mind and some kind of plan that embraced not only her and himself but the children, Jonquil and Keith, for surely all four of them were closely involved in any kind of change or move. But here was something that did not involve them, or, if it did, could certainly bring pain and distress to them and perhaps misery to Sybil, who would surely find it very difficult to believe that a husband who, in nineteen years of married life, had never given her a moment's anxiety regarding other women, should in his fiftieth year admit to an almost over-powering yearning for romance.

'Romance' he called it, but was that its real name? Wasn't it something more down-to-earth, sexual curiosity or-face it man- middle-aged lust? He hoped not. With all his heart he hoped not, for if it was then how thin the partition separating him from the poor devils he read 'about in Sunday newspapers, men of his own age who pounced in parks and cinemas and were hauled before Magisterial Benches on far more shameful charges than any Lane-Perkins' father could bring.

For a moment or so he thought of the Headmaster's remarks about the change of life and wondered if, after all, they were as ridiculous as they seemed. Perhaps men did suffer a physical change and perhaps the manifestation of that change included a wild hunger for sexual adventures, for new and exciting conquests, or weird and bizarre experiments in fields that Mr. Sermon had glimpsed

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between covers in the Charing Cross Road. As he thought about this, Sebastian was conscious of shame and disloyalty. A man, he thought, might be forgiven such hunger if he had married a cold, niggardly woman, miserly with her embraces and impatient with male appetites, but Sybil was not such a woman. She was generous and even gracious in her duties and if gratification left him vaguely disappointed then it was not she who was to blame but himself, for his experience in the subtleties of courtship was very limited. Her very complaisance in these matters made him cautious and inhibited instead of bold and boisterous and almost masochistically he now forced himself to consider their love-making over the last few years. He was dismayed to discover that it fell into the same category as everything else about which he felt so dissatisfied. It never varied. It was like the houses and the quiet roads of the estate. It was like the overture to one of Sybil's Gilbert and Sullivan productions, where stage business was a protocol. It began and ended with a stealthy fumbling and was never once commented upon, either at the time or later. It was played on a single note without the slightest variation of theme or scale and had developed over the years into a domestic habit, like hanging up a raincoat or putting the cat out before locking up and going to bed. Yet, despite all this, it was never begrudged and therefore it must follow that Sybil was blameless and he alone was at fault, not only in this respect but others. The same timid approach was apparent in his relationship with the Headmaster and other members of the staff, and in his handling of money and authority. Years had gone by and he had never once asserted himself, not as a schoolmaster, a father-or ajiusband and certainly never as a lover! Sybil had provided most of the money and Sybil, immersed in her various social activities, had thoroughly spoiled the children, and all the time he had stood in the wings, patiently but by no means unhappily wielding a titular authority. He had occupied a touchline position ready to cheer but had never entered the scrimmage. Suddenly, and with ruthless weight, the full realisation of what this implied crashed down on him and almost flattened him. If he dropped dead at this instant, he reflected, no one would miss him, for who would rush to replace something that had never really been there ? He was nearly fifty and he might never have existed at all!

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In the moment of his desolation, the most acute he had ever known, Mr. Sermon looked round for support and in those fleeting seconds he felt closer to his wife than he had ever felt when she lay in his arms. He wanted to run down the slope, cut through the estate, find her and lay his head on her bare bosom. He almost cried out with a yearning to be stroked and comforted, encouraged and reassured and on the crest of this tidal wave of emotion he jumped up and began to descend the downland slope at a fast trot that carried him breathless and weak at the knees through Plane Tree Road and Montgomery Close and out into Beechway to his own front gate.

And there he stopped dead. The gate was open and the twenty-yard driveway was choked with cars, all kinds of cars, from shiny new Hillmans and Wolseleys to the souped-up sports model driven by young Aubrey Marcheson, cashier at the local Midland Bank. With a loud snort of indignation, Mr. Sermon realised that it was Thursday and that Thursday was the day Sybil entertained the committee of the Wyckham Rise Operatic and Dramatic Society, and that the entire group, plus half a dozen hangers on, were now gathered in the garden room and spilling over into the conservatory and kitchen, nibbling her cucumber sandwiches and jockeying for advantage over one another. He stood at the foot of the drive for a moment almost weeping with disappointment and then, goaded by his new resolution, he threw up his head and marched stolidly up the drive and into the house via the open front door.

There were far more people about than he had expected. A dozen of them were standing in the garden room, listening to Aubrey Marcheson denigrate an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest over at Shute the previous evening. The women were giggling at his improvised commentary and the men stood around and grinned, enjoying the ridicule of a company that had beaten the Wyckham group in the Drama Festival the previous autumn. Aubrey fancied himself as a raconteur and was enjoying the attention his performance commanded. It was, in fact, quite a good performance,

better than those he gave on the stage. Half watching, with a tolerant smile on her lips, Sybil Sermon wondered if he would do for the autumn presentation of Arms and the Man that she was mind-casting.

Sybil enjoyed these occasions very much. They relaxed her, giving her a sense of power and patronage that was whittled down at real rehearsals. She glided in and out of the garden-room and back and forth from the kitchen, sifting among the crop of problems that a Spring casting conference presented. Would the Bank give Aubrey the afternoon off during the final week of rehearsal ? Would Diana Gordon-Scott resign if she didn't get the Presidency at the Annual meeting and if she did, who would replace her annual ten guinea sub ? These queries, and a score like them, flowed into her mind like questions fed into a computer and, like a computer, her mind considered them and came up with the inherent probability. Buried a stratum deeper in her brain was the curiously abrupt phone call she had received about an hour ago from Sebastian's Headmaster, the dreary little man whom she set out to charm on Sports Days and Speech Days. The call informed her that her husband was 'not himself and had left an hour earlier to come home. Sybil was accustomed to phone hints and she did not miss the Reverend Hawley's. He said Sebastian was 'not himself but the Headmaster was clearly upset about something and whatever it was it involved Sebastian. She had evaded his implied invitation to discuss the subject more thoroughly and had merely thanked him for ringing and replaced the receiver. She was not a curious woman and was not greatly interested in the school where Sebastian seemed to have settled after so many tiresome false starts. He went there every term-time morning and he came home every term-time night. Sometimes he told her one or two things that had happened during the day but more often he did not. The school was his background. She was engrossed in her own and as she walked away from the phone she thought, incuriously, 'Sebastian has done something the Head doesn't like and they've had a tiff!' but then the front door bell had rung and the first of her guests arrived. She put Sebastian into a top-tier locker of her brain and moved into the garden-room to arrange herself before the tall, Regency mirror before settling into

a deep arm-chair and picking up a script as though she had been studying it for the past hour.

At thirty-nine, Sybil Sermon was a neat but comfortably built woman who could have passed in any light for thirty. She had soft, dark hair with a natural wave in it and good, regular features. Her nose was short, her mouth full and her eyes, set widely apart, grey and serious with long, dark lashes. People could never be quite sure about her eyes. They regarded you steadily and sympathetically when you addressed her but even her intimates had the impression that they were not really attending to you but looking somewhere beyond and at a considerable range. She had an exceptionally clear complexion, pale and smooth without the waxiness sometimes seen in fair-skinned brunettes. She had a fine bust and broad hips but a remarkably neat waist, so that men thought of, her as what the Edwardians would have called a fine woman rather than a pretty one. She was not pretty, having just too much repose and dignity, particularly in the way she walked, for when she crossed a room one never noticed the movement of her feet and this was precisely what she intended for her feet were large and rather clumsy. She gave an overall impression of kindness and tolerance, even when dealing with the dull and stupid. She was a good listener-if she was listening -but here again one could never be sure that she was for her dignity enlarged itself into a kind of polite aloofness that disconcerted the earnest and the merely talkative. Women respected her without liking her and men admired her but were seldom at ease with her. Ralph Mallow, the auctioneer who played heavy roles in her productions, was one of the few who did not like her. He called her The Ice Maiden and once said of her: "She's the kind of woman who would say, 'Die of prussic acid poisoning if you must but try not to make too much noise about it'!"

In addition to her crinoline-sway walk Sybil had a low, slightly husky voice, intimate and somehow persuasive, so that people remembered it with affection even when they had detected all her other artifices designed to establish the fact that she was not only

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a handsome woman but a very cultivated one. She was not, however, a conscious hypocrite, or no more so than any woman whose father had made money very quickly and whisked his only child from a flat over a shop to a somewhat pretentious but expensive boarding school and later, for a year, to a finishing establishment near Caux. Sybil Sermon, nee Rudge, had suffered from this switch all her life. She could never really reconcile a world that smelled of tallow and bran and vinegar with one smelling of mink. She was not really in the mink bracket and had been young enough, when her father had expanded, to pull down the shop-blind on her natural background of cartons, stock-racks and weekly credit lists. Finding herself in this limbo she had settled for the front-rank of the avant-garde in suburbia and here she found her true level, for her good taste, her intelligence, her natural graciousness and her private income had soon won for her a position of undisputed leadership in the birch-tree belt a few miles south of London. She held on to this position with a desperation that was at odds with her generous and slightly indolent nature. She was not and never would be an intellectual and her obsession with the current trends of literature and drama was largely assumed, much as a tourist might pretend to a genuine interest in the customs and history of a country in which she was spending a fourteen-day holiday. Her chief asset in this field was her astonishing memory. She could swallow and regurgitate an article from The New Statesman in a matter of minutes and this did as much to win her social leadership of Wyckham Rise as did her carriage, her money and her soft, appealing voice. In the immediate area of her home she had no rivals. The women deferred to her as an expert who could quote critical opinion on the current production at the Royal Court Theatre verbatim, and men of all ages flirted with her because she was a striking woman and because she encouraged them to flirt. Sometimes she reproved them with her serious eyes but she allowed them to retain her hand for a few extra seconds when a prompt script was exchanged. In the handling of men she was remarkably skilful, promising much but yielding very little. She would have described her marriage as a quiet success for she was proud of her pretty, sulky daughter and mechanically-inclined son, and for years now she had managed to keep her family and her social interests in watertight