The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (49 page)

^{"You didn't give me time," he said, grinning, and slowly peeled off the jacket.}

^{He watched her smooth the pocket flaps and hang the coat on a hanger thinking that never before had he seen her so tousled or relaxed or at ease with him. As she crossed back in front of the window the last flush of the sunset struck her bare shoulders and seemed to linger a moment in the short hair on her neck. Satiated he still thought of her as the most desirable woman he had ever seen or imagined and said: "You're beautiful, Sybil, far more so than when you were a girl!" She sat down at the dressing table stool and smiled at him in the tilted mirror.}

^{'You've already told me that half a dozen times this evening but}

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^{I can take any amount of encores at my age-Preacher!" and she began to dress her hair, raising both hands so that golden light ran across her shoulders.}

^{"Come over here again!" he said, but she laughed, spilling a hairpin from her mouth and said, "No, not until we've eaten, but tell me something else. What is it you find so special about this particular school? It isn't status, I know you better than that."}

^{"You'd have to be there for some time and it'll grow on you," he told her. "I'm banking on that but the school is only a part of it, quite a small part."}

^{"It's everything that's happened to you lately!"}

^{"Yes. You notice the difference?"}

^{"Indeed I do, you impressed it on me!" and she stopped arranging her hair and sat sideways on the bed, looking down at him with a curious teasing light in her eyes that was as strange to him as everything else about her since she had dressed the wound on his hand.}

^{He said: "Self-doubt is a worse handicap than a physical disability. A man can get by with one leg or one arm but he's in a strait jacket for life if he learns to think of himself as a non-starter by the time he's twenty! That's what happened to me and it wasn't until I got right away that time that I got one arm free and discovered I was as effective with that as most men are with two! But it wasn't just a case of learning to believe in myself, it was the attitude of other people the moment I made the effort. That first day away I earned twenty pounds on a deal, bamboozled one of the toughest operators in The Trade and was the life and soul of a party at a pub! In the weeks that followed I drove a passenger coach through a storm over some of the worst roads in the country and rescued a child from drowning in front of a hundred people. I also discovered that I could exercise effective authority over men and women as well as boys!"}

^{She was propped up on one elbow looking down at him and the smile, half affectionate, half teasing, was still playing about her lips.}

^{"Anything else? Any more conquered worlds Alexander?"}

^{He paused a moment and then, deliberately, added: "Two women fell in love with me or thought they did! I suppose that helped as much as the other conquests."}

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^{"Yes, it would," she said, "I can imagine that. Am I going to hear about them?"}

^{"No, you're not," he said, "at all events not yet!" and he made a grab at her and pulled her down so that their lips met and freshly applied lipstick transferred itself to his chin. "Oh God, Sybil!" he said, the banter leaving his voice, "I need you and want you so terribly! I said I got one hand free but the other never was, not until now! It would have been like winning a fortune and not being allowed to do more than count it every night! I can't believe it's happened the way it has, I need to keep reassuring myself!" and he let his hands slip down over her shoulders and half-raised himself to kiss her softly on each breast.}

^{She got up and said, lightly, "You need a shave. I'll call up when supper's ready," and she slipped into her dressing-gown and went out.}

^{He got up and went into the bathroom to look for a spare razor he knew was there and as he ran water he heard her moving about in the kitchen immediately below. He did not believe in miracles but here was one, the kind of .wife he had always wanted emerging as from a magic bottle or an Olympian cloud, a gay, tolerant woman who not only welcomed his affection but had suddenly learned to bask in it and then feed it back to him with prodigal generosity, a woman with whom he felt completely at ease as though this fusion of personalities was the result of years and years of adjustment and shared experience. He did not believe that a single dominant act on his part could have brought about such a change but was inclined to think that the mere act of spanking her at a moment when she was shocked at the sight of the blood she had drawn had completed a corrosive process, something that had begun as long ago as last spring when she had first found herself alone. It must, he thought, have something to do with her physical needs and had she been a different kind of woman he might well have lost her altogether but she was not a woman who could find satisfaction in promiscuous relationships. She was Sybil Sermon, the woman whose apparent need to be surrounded by admirers and queen of her immediate circle was nothing but a tiresome substitute for the demands of a single, virile male, someone who knew what he wanted and how to}

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^{go about getting it. His mistake had been in not making those demands long ago, in not elbowing the troubled memory of Norman Stephenson and of other men she had known out of the way, and he realised now that he could have done this from the very beginning had he possessed one-tenth of the confidence in himself that he possessed now.}

^{Well, he was extraordinarily lucky that it was not too late, that they could begin again at a couple of minutes to midnight and as he puckered his lip to scrape away at his beard with a blade that she had been misusing in his absence, he was conscious of a great, warm rush of affection for her that caught at his heart like a chord of organ music and filled him with a sense of joy and well-being so intense that his hand trembled and he had to lay the razor aside and steady himself for a moment.}

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^{CHAPTER
ELEVEN}

^{For Those Who}

^{Insist on Looking}

^{Round Corners}

^{on
the morning of his fiftieth birthday, a Saturday early in April, Mr. Sermon took advantage of a free period and went across the quad and up the long slope of the sports field to the chestnut tree where the cricket roller was parked.}

^{Sebastian had been doing house-duty for Bennett who was sick and had remained at school overnight so he paused outside the library wondering whether he should phone Sybil but decided against it. When he left her the previous day she had seemed to him to be enjoying the very best of health and was probably at this moment helping Mrs. Baxter, her daily, turn out one of the rooms. Sybil had been doing a great deal of turning out lately and when he had commented upon it she had told him that it was a compulsion that often accompanied pregnancy. He thought, as he walked along the rim of the staked-out running track, 'Great Scot, I'm fifty today and on the point of becoming a father again! If someone had prophesied this a year ago I should have considered them indecent!'}

^{He took a seat on the huge roller and lit a cigarette, considering whether he wanted Sybil's child to be male or female and decided, quite definitely, that it ought to be male. The boy would come here,}

^{he supposed but by that time he himself would be getting on for retirement and Sybil would be in her middle fifties. It was rather sad, he thought, that the child should have such elderly parents but that was something that couldn't be helped. The astonishing thing was that it should exist at all and his mind travelled back over the pleasant, almost uneventful months to the day the child had been conceived after that fantastic climax to his seventeen-week odyssey.}

^{The sun was very warm up here, beating on his face through a gap in the larch plantation and he wondered if it was shining on Rachel Grey and if the snows had melted in Ontario. Had she found what she was looking for out there he wondered, or had she abandoned veterinary work in favour of some fresh enthusiasm? He had no way of knowing for sure, she had written once to him and twice to her father but she was not much of a correspondent and never told you anything important. Not like Olga, for instance, now settled in Boston and more American than the Americans if her opinions on the latest world crisis were any guide.}

^{He rummaged in his pocket wondering if he still had Olga's last letter but it was not there and among the various papers and reminder notes he found one bearing a telephone number. For a moment or so it meant absolutely nothing to him and then he remembered, it was a number that Tapper Sugg had urged him to call and make an appointment to see some gilt cupids and oak panelling. He still executed commissions for Tapper and found most of them profitable. He knew now that he would never forsake teaching, would never contemplate exchanging Barrowdene for another school not even if they offered him a Headship but it was pleasant to feel that if ever he needed an alternative means of livelihood there was one waiting for him round the corner. He folded the slip of paper and carefully replaced it in his wallet.}

^{The five-minute bell clanged across the big field and Sebastian saw the crane-like figure of the Headmaster coast round the corner of the chapel and make his way along the cloister to the seat under the fives court, now occupied by a solitary boy.}

^{'That's odd," he said to himself, 'I wondered why young Kibbins was moping there. Rowlandson can't have sent him out of class}

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^{because Rowlandson never sends anyone out!" and he watched the boy stand up as the Headmaster approached and remain in conversation with him for a moment. Presently the boy pointed up towards the plantation and the Head began to stride in Sebastian's direction. 'He wants me for something," Sebastian told himself, 'and I imagine it's to ask about the journey-money cheque.'}

^{"Hullo there!" Grey called when he was about fifty yards off. "I was looking for you, Sermon."}

^{"I thought you were and I cashed the cheque and gave the money to the Bursar," Sebastian told him.}

^{"You did what? Oh yes . . . yes, yes, but it wasn't about that!" He stopped, rubbing his long nose. "Hanged if I can remember what I did want you for now Sermon, but come, take a turn with me! Lovely morning ... I like the smell of a morning like this, it reduces me to round about forty again!"}

^{"Delighted to hear it, Headmaster," said Sebastian, "I'm fifty today!"}

^{"You are? Splendid, splendid, you don't look it my dear fellow," and the Head took his arm in a familiar fashion and propelled Sebastian down the gentle slope.}

^{"Have you remembered what you wanted to see me about?" asked Sebastian, as they approached the war memorial.}

^{"Yes, I have, it's Kibbins," said the Head, "he's going through a bad time, Sermon. Parents got themselves divorced last week and the wretched little toad doesn't even know where he's going when we break up tomorrow week!"}

^{"I'm sorry to hear that," said Sebastian. "He's in Bennett's house isn't he? Can't Mrs. Bennett take him on for a week or so?"}

^{"No, she can't," said Grey, "because Bennett's going into hospital for his operation on Saturday," and he paused, regarding Mr. Sermon speculatively from under hedgelike brows. "Fact is, Kibbins' father can't pick him up for a fortnight. He rang me this morning about it and I've just told the boy. He took it pretty badly," and again he waited, still looking hard at Sebastian.}

^{"Well, I don't know . . ." began Mr. Sermon, hesitantly and then, with a glance over his shoulder at the distant figure on the fives}

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^{court seat, he made a decision. Without knowing why he felt a sudden kinship with the boy and it occurred to him that by the end of term Sybil would almost certainly have entered the nursing home. He knew Kibbins but slightly, remembering him as a studious type who kept to himself, read a great deal and was a duffer at games.}

^{"You were saying?" said the Head, hopefully.}

^{"He can stay with me if he doesn't mind pigging it," said Sebastian. "The baby is due any day and when Sybil goes into the nursing home I shall be looking after myself. Would Kibbins care to share my chores until his father calls for him?"}

^{Fred Grey beamed and thumped Sebastian's shoulder. "I'm quite sure he would," he said enthusiastically and then, as though confiding a great secret, "As a matter of fact, Sermon, I was rather hoping you'd offer but I knew your wife's time was near and I didn't like to ask."}

^{"You almost did ask," said Mr. Sermon with a grin.}

^{"Yes, I did, didn't I?" admitted Grey blandly. "He could stay on at school of course, but this is a depressing place when the boys have gone and frankly, Kibbins needs a friend! Not me, I'm far too talkative! Do you know, Sermon, more than half the trouble here can be traced back to the divorce courts!"}

^{"Yes, I've already noticed that," said Sebastian and suddenly he saw the source of his kinship with Kibbins and understood why he had offered to take the boy in. Not long ago he himself had been teetering on the edge of a divorce and he realised, looking back, that he had been very upset about it. Somehow, because of this, he felt that he owed Kibbins a slice of comradeship.}