Collected Stories

Mrs Silly

Michael couldn’t remember a time when his father had been there. There’d always been the flat where he and his mother lived, poky and cluttered even though his mother tried so. Every Saturday his father came to collect him. He remembered a blue car and then a greenish one. The latest one was white, an Alfa-Romeo.

Saturday with his father was the highlight of the week. Unlike his mother’s flat, his father’s house was spacious and nicely carpeted. There was Gillian, his father’s wife, who never seemed in a hurry, who smiled and didn’t waste time. Her smile was cool, which matched the way she dressed. Her voice was quiet and reliable: Michael couldn’t imagine it ever becoming shrill or weepy or furious, or in any other way getting out of control. It was a nice voice, as nice as Gillian herself.

His father and Gillian had two little girls, twins of six, two years younger than Michael. They lived near Cranleigh, in a half-timbered house in pretty wooded countryside. On Saturday mornings the drive from London took over an hour, but Michael never minded and on the way back he usually fell asleep. There was a room in the house that his father and Gillian had made his own, which the twins weren’t allowed to enter in his absence. He had his Triang train circuit there, on a table that had been specially built into the wall for it.

It was in this house, one Saturday afternoon, that Michael’s father brought up the subject of Elton Grange. ‘You’re nearly nine, you know,’ his father said. ‘It’s high time, really, old chap.’

Elton Grange was a preparatory school in Wiltshire, which Michael’s father had gone to himself. He’d mentioned it many times before and so had Michael’s mother, but in Michael’s mind it was a place that belonged to the distant future – with Radley, where his father had gone, also. He certainly knew that he wasn’t going to stay at the primary school in Hammersmith for ever, and had always taken it for granted that he would move away from it when the rest of his class moved, at eleven. He felt, without actually being able to recall the relevant conversation, that his mother had quite definitely implied this. But it didn’t work out like that. ‘You should go in September,’ his father said, and that was that.

‘Oh, darling,’ his mother murmured when the arrangements had all been made. ‘Oh, Michael, I’ll miss you.’

His father would pay the fees and his father would in future give him pocket-money, over and above what his mother gave him. He’d like it at Elton Grange, his father promised. ‘Oh yes, you’ll like it,’ his mother said too.

She was a woman of medium height, five foot four, with a round, plump face and plump arms and legs. There was a soft prettiness about her, about her light-blue eyes and her wide, simple mouth and her fair, rather fluffy hair. Her hands were always warm, as if expressing the warmth of her nature. She wept easily and often said she was silly to weep so. She talked a lot, getting carried away when she didn’t watch herself: for this failing, too, she regularly said she was silly. ‘Mrs Silly’, she used to say when Michael was younger, condemning herself playfully for the two small follies she found it hard to control.

She worked as a secretary for an Indian, a Mr Ashaf, who had an office-stationery business. There was the shop – more of a warehouse, really – with stacks of swivel chairs and filing-cabinets on top of one another and green metal desks, and cartons containing continuation paper and top-copy foolscap and flimsy, and printed invoices. There were other cartons full of envelopes, and packets of paper-clips, drawing-pins and staples. The carbon-paper supplies were kept in the office behind the shop, where Michael’s mother sat in front of a typewriter, typing invoices mainly. Mr Ashaf, a small wiry man, was always on his feet, moving between the shop and the office, keeping an eye on Michael’s mother and on Dolores Welsh who looked after the retail side. Before she’d married, Michael’s mother had been a secretary in the Wedgwood Centre, but returning to work at the time of her divorce she’d found it more convenient to work for Mr Ashaf since his premises were only five minutes away from where she and Michael lived. Mr Ashaf was happy to employ her on the kind of part-time basis that meant she could be at home every afternoon by the time Michael got in from school. During the holidays Mr Ashaf permitted her to take the typewriter to her flat, to come in every morning to collect what work there was and hand over what she’d done the day before. When this arrangement wasn’t convenient, due to the nature of the work, Michael accompanied her to Mr Ashaf’s premises and sat in the office with her or with Dolores Welsh in the shop. Mr Ashaf used occasionally to give him a sweet.

‘Perhaps I’ll change my job,’ Michael’s mother said brightly, a week before he was due to become a boarder at Elton Grange. ‘I could maybe go back to the West End. Nice to have a few more pennies.’ She was cheering herself up – he could tell by the way she looked at him. She packed his belongings carefully, giving him many instructions about looking after himself, about keeping himself warm and changing any clothes that got wet. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said at Paddington on the afternoon of his departure. ‘Oh, darling, I’ll miss you so!’

He would miss her, too. Although his father and Gillian were in every way more fun than his mother, it was his mother he loved. Although she fussed and was a nuisance sometimes, there was always the warmth, the cosiness of climbing into her bed on Sunday mornings or watching Magic Roundabout together. He was too big for Magic Roundabout now, or so he considered, and he rather thought he was too big to go on climbing into her bed. But the memories of all this cosiness had become part of his relationship with her.

She wept as they stood together on the platform. She held him close to her, pressing his head against her breast. ‘Oh, darling!’ she said. ‘Oh, my darling.’

Her tears damped his face. She sniffed and sobbed, whispering that she didn’t know what she’d do. ‘Poor thing!’ someone passing said. She blew her nose. She apologized to Michael, trying to smile. ‘Remember where your envelopes are,’ she said. She’d addressed and stamped a dozen envelopes for him so that he could write to her. She wanted him to write at once, just to say he’d arrived safely.

‘And don’t be homesick now,’ she said, her own voice trembling again. ‘Big boy, Michael.’

The train left her behind. He waved from the corridor window, and she gestured at him, indicating that he shouldn’t lean out. But because of the distances between them he couldn’t understand what the gesture meant. When the train stopped at Reading he found his writing-paper and envelopes in his overnight bag and began to write to her.

At Elton Grange he was in the lowest form, Miss Brooks’s form. Miss Brooks, grey-haired at sixty, was the only woman on the teaching staff. She did not share the men’s common-room but sat instead in the matrons’ room, where she smoked Senior Service cigarettes between lessons. There was pale tobacco-tinged hair on her face, and on Tuesday and Friday afternoons she wore jodhpurs, being in charge of the school’s riding. Brookie she was known as.

The other women at Elton Grange were Sister and the undermatron Miss Trenchard, the headmaster’s wife Mrs Lyng, the lady cook Miss Arland, and the maids. Mrs Lyng was a stout woman, known among the boys as Outsize Dorothy, and Sister was thin and brisk. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were both under twenty-three; Miss Arland was pretty and Miss Trenchard wasn’t. Miss Arland went about a lot with the history and geography master, Cocky Marshall, and Miss Trenchard was occasionally seen with the P.T. instructor, a Welshman, who was also in charge of the carpentry shop. Among the older boys Miss Trenchard was sometimes known as Tampax.

Twice a week Michael wrote to his mother, and on Sundays he wrote to his father as well. He told them that the headmaster was known to everyone as A.J.L. and he told them about the rules, how no boy in the three lower forms was permitted to be seen with his hands in his pockets and how no boy was permitted to run through A.J.L.’s garden. He said the food was awful because that was what everyone else said, although he quite liked it really.

At half-term his father and Gillian came. They stayed in the Grand, and Michael had lunch and tea there on the Saturday and on the Sunday, and just lunch on the Monday because they had to leave in the afternoon. He told them about his friends, Carson and Tichbourne, and his father suggested that next half-term Carson and Tichbourne might like to have lunch or tea at the Grand. ‘Or maybe Swagger Browne,’ Michael said. Browne’s people lived in Kenya and his grandmother, with whom he spent the holidays, wasn’t always able to come at half-term. ‘Hard up,’ Michael said.

Tichbourne and Carson were in Michael’s dormitory, and there was one other boy, called Andrews: they were all aged eight. At night, after lights out, they talked about most things: about their families and the houses they lived in and the other schools they’d been at. Carson told about the time he’d put stink-bombs under the chair-legs when people were coming to play bridge, and Andrews about the time he’d been caught, by a policeman, stealing strawberries.

‘What’s it like?’ Andrews asked in the dormitory one night. ‘What’s it like, a divorce?’

‘D’you see your mother?’ Tichbourne asked, and Michael explained that it was his mother he lived with, not his father.

‘Often wondered what it’s like for the kids,’ Andrews said. ‘There’s a woman in our village who’s divorced. She ran off with another bloke, only the next thing was he ran off with someone else.’

‘Who’d your mum run off with?’ Carson asked.

‘No one.’

‘Your dad run off then?’

‘Yes.’

His mother had told him that his father left her because they didn’t get on any more. He hadn’t left her because he knew Gillian. He hadn’t met Gillian for years after that.

‘D’you like her?’ Andrews asked. ‘Gillian?’

‘She’s all right. They’ve got twins now, my dad and Gillian. Girls.’

‘I’d hate it if my mum and dad got divorced,’ Tichbourne said.

‘Mine quarrelled all last holidays,’ Carson said, ‘about having a room decorated.’

‘Can’t stand it when they quarrel,’ Andrews said.

Intrigued by a situation that was strange to them, the other boys often asked after that about the divorce. How badly did people have to quarrel before they decided on one? Was Gillian different from Michael’s mother? Did Michael’s mother hate her? Did she hate his father?

‘They never see one another,’ Michael said. ‘She’s not like Gillian at all.’

At the end of the term the staff put on a show called Staff Laughs. Cocky Marshall was incarcerated all during one sketch in a wooden container that was meant to be a steam bath. Something had gone wrong with it. The steam was too hot and the catch had become jammed. Cocky Marshall was red in the face and nobody knew if he was putting it on or not until the end of the sketch, when he stepped out of the container in his underclothes. Mr Waydelin had to wear a kilt in another sketch and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard were dressed up in rugby togs, with Cocky Marshall’s and Mr Brine’s scrum caps. The Reverend Green – mathematics and divinity – was enthusiastically applauded in his Mrs Wagstaffe sketch. A.J.L. did his magic, and as a grand finale the whole staff, including Miss Brooks, sang together, arm-in-arm, on the small stage. ‘We’re going home,’ they sang. ‘We’re going home. We’re on the way that leads to home. We’ve seen the good things and the bad and now we’re absolutely mad. We’re g-o-i-n-g home.’ All the boys joined in the chorus, and that night in Michael’s dormitory they ate Crunchie, Galaxy and Mars Bars and didn’t wash their teeth afterwards. At half past twelve the next day Michael’s mother was waiting for him at Paddington.

At home, nothing was different. On Saturdays his father came and drove him away to the house near Cranleigh. His mother talked about Dolores Welsh and Mr Ashaf. She hadn’t returned to work in the West End. It was quite nice really, she said, at Mr Ashaf’s.

Christmas came and went. His father gave him a new Triang locomotive and Gillian gave him a pogo-stick and the twins a magnet and a set of felt pens. His mother decorated the flat and put fairy-lights on a small Christmas tree. She filled his stocking on Christmas Eve when he was asleep and the next day, after they’d had their Christmas dinner, she gave him a football and a glove puppet and a jigsaw of Windsor Castle. He gave her a brooch he’d bought in Woolworth’s. On January 14th he returned to Elton Grange.

Nothing was different at Elton Grange either, except that Cocky Marshall had left. Nobody had known he was going to leave, and some boys said he had been sacked. But others denied that, claiming that he’d gone of his own accord, without giving the required term’s notice. They said A.J.L. was livid.

Three weeks passed, and then one morning Michael received a letter from his father saying that neither he nor Gillian would be able to come at half-term because he had to go to Tunisia on business and wanted to take Gillian with him. He sent some money to make up for the disappointment.

In a letter to his mother, not knowing what to say because nothing much was happening, Michael revealed that his father wouldn’t be there at half-term. Then I shall come, his mother wrote back.

She stayed, not in the Grand, but in a boarding-house called Sans Souci, which had coloured gnomes fishing in a pond in the front garden, and a black gate with one hinge broken. They weren’t able to have lunch there on the Saturday because the woman who ran it, Mrs Malone, didn’t do lunches. They had lunch in the Copper Kettle, and since Mrs Malone didn’t do teas either they had tea in the Copper Kettle as well. They walked around the town between lunch and tea, and after tea they sat together in his mother’s bedroom until it was time to catch the bus back to school.

The next day she said she’d like to see over the school, so he brought her into the chapel, which once had been the gate-lodge, and into the classrooms and the gymnasium and the art-room and the changing-rooms. In the carpentry shop the P.T. instructor was making a cupboard. ‘Who’s that boy?’ his mother whispered, unfortunately just loud enough for the P.T. instructor to hear. He smiled. Swagger Browne, who was standing about doing nothing, giggled.

‘But how could he be a boy?’ Michael asked dismally, leading the way on the cinder path that ran around the cricket pitch. ‘Boys at Elton only go up to thirteen and a half.’

‘Oh dear, of course,’ his mother said. She began to talk of other things. She spoke quickly. Dolores Welsh, she thought, was going to get married, Mr Ashaf had wrenched his arm. She’d spoken to the landlord about the damp that kept coming in the bathroom, but the landlord had said that to cure it would mean a major upheaval for them.

All the time she was speaking, while they walked slowly on the cinder path, he kept thinking about the P.T. instructor, unable to understand how his mother could ever have mistaken him for a boy. It was a cold morning and rather damp, not raining heavily, not even drizzling, but misty in a particularly wetting kind of way. He wondered where they were going to go for lunch, since the woman in the Copper Kettle had said yesterday that the café didn’t open on Sundays.

‘Perhaps we could go and look at the dormitories?’ his mother suggested when they came to the end of the cinder path.

He didn’t want to, but for some reason he felt shy about saying so. If he said he didn’t want to show her the dormitories, she’d ask him why and he wouldn’t know what to say because he didn’t know himself.

‘All right,’ he said.

They walked through the dank mist, back to the school buildings, which were mostly of red brick, some with a straggle of Virginia creeper on them. The new classrooms, presented a year ago by the father of a boy who had left, were of pinker brick than the rest. The old classrooms had been nicer, Michael’s father said: they’d once been the stables.

There were several entrances to the house itself. The main one, approached from the cricket pitch by crossing A.J.L.’s lawns and then crossing a large, almost circular gravel expanse, was grandiose in the early Victorian style. Stone pillars supported a wide gothic arch through which, in a sizeable vestibule, further pillars framed a heavy oak front door. There were croquet mallets and hoops in a wooden box in this vestibule, and deck-chairs and two coloured golfing umbrellas. There was an elaborate wrought-iron scraper and a revolving brush for taking the mud from shoes and boots. On either side of the large hall door there was a round window, composed of circular, lead-encased panes. ‘Well, at least they haven’t got rid of those,’ Michael’s father had said, for these circular windows were a feature that boys who had been to Elton Grange often recalled with affection.

The other entrances to the house were at the back and it was through one of these, leading her in from the quadrangle and the squat new classrooms, past the kitchens and the staff lavatory, that Michael directed his mother on their way to the dormitories. All the other places they’d visited had been outside the house itself – the gymnasium and the changing-rooms were converted outbuildings, the carpentry shop was a wooden shed tucked neatly out of the way beside the garages, the art-room was an old conservatory, and the classroom block stood on its own, forming two sides of the quadrangle.

‘What a nice smell!’ Michael’s mother whispered as they passed the kitchens, as Michael pressed himself against the wall to let Miss Brooks, in her jodhpurs, go by. Miss Brooks was carrying a riding stick and had a cigarette going. She didn’t smile at Michael, nor at Michael’s mother.

They went up the back stairs and Michael hoped they wouldn’t meet anyone else. All the boys, except the ones like Swagger Browne whose people lived abroad, were out with their parents and usually the staff went away at half-term, if they possibly could. But A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy never went away, nor did Sister, and Miss Trenchard had been there at prayers.

‘How ever do you find your way through all these passages?’ his mother whispered as he led her expertly towards his dormitory. He explained, in a low voice also, that you got used to the passages.

‘Here it is,’ he said, relieved to find that neither Sister nor Miss Trenchard was laying out clean towels. He closed the door behind them. ‘That’s my bed there,’ he said.

He stood against the door with his ear cocked while she went to the bed and looked at it. She turned and smiled at him, her head a little on one side. She opened a locker and looked inside, but he explained that the locker she was looking in was Carson’s. ‘Where’d that nice rug come from?’ she asked, and he said that he’d written to Gillian to say he’d been cold once or twice at night, and she’d sent him the rug immediately. ‘Oh,’ his mother said dispiritedly. ‘Well, that was nice of Gillian,’ she added.

She crossed to one of the windows and looked down over A.J.L.’s lawns to the chestnut trees that surrounded the playing-fields. It really was a beautiful place, she said.

She smiled at him again and he thought, what he’d never thought before, that her clothes were cheap-looking. Gillian’s clothes were clothes you somehow didn’t notice: it didn’t occur to you to think they were cheap-looking or expensive. The women of Elton Grange all dressed differently, Outsize Dorothy in woollen things, Miss Brooks in suits, with a tie, and Sister and Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland always had white coats. The maids wore blue overalls most of the time but sometimes you saw them going home in the evenings in their ordinary clothes, which you never really thought about and certainly you never thought were cheap-looking.

‘Really beautiful,’ she said, still smiling, still at the window. She was wearing a headscarf and a maroon coat and another scarf at her neck. Her handbag was maroon also, but it was old, with something broken on one of the buckles: it was the handbag, he said to himself, that made you think she was cheaply dressed.

He left the door and went to her, taking her arm. He felt ashamed that he’d thought her clothes were cheap-looking. She’d been upset when he’d told her that the rug had been sent by Gillian. She’d been upset and he hadn’t bothered.

‘Oh, Mummy,’ he said.

She hugged him to her, and when he looked up into her face he saw the mark of a tear on one of her cheeks. Her fluffy hair was sticking out a bit beneath the headscarf, her round, plump face was forcing itself to smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Sorry? Darling, there’s no need.’

‘I’m sorry you’re left all alone there, Mummy.’

‘Oh, but I’m not at all. I’ve got the office every day, and one of these days I really will see about going back to the West End. We’ve been awfully busy at the office, actually, masses to do.’

The sympathy he’d showed caused her to talk. Up to now – ever since they’d met the day before – she’d quite deliberately held herself back in this respect, knowing that to chatter on wouldn’t be the thing at all. Yesterday she’d waited until she’d returned to Sans Souci before relaxing. She’d had a nice long chat with Mrs Malone on the landing, which unfortunately had been spoiled by a man in one of Mrs Malone’s upper rooms poking his head out and asking for a bit of peace. ‘Sorry about that,’ she’d heard Mrs Malone saying to him later. ‘Couldn’t really stop her’ – a statement that had spoiled things even more. ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she’d said quietly to Mrs Malone at breakfast.

‘Let’s go down now,’ Michael said.

But his mother didn’t hear this remark, engaged as she was upon making a series of remarks herself. She was no longer discreetly whispering, but chattering on with even more abandon than she had displayed on Mrs Malone’s stairs the night before. A flush had spread over her cheeks and around her mouth and on the portion of her neck which could be seen above her scarf. Michael could see she was happy.

‘We’ll have to go to Dolores’ wedding,’ she said. ‘On the 8th. The 8th of May, a Thursday I think it is. They’re coming round actually, Dolores and her young chap, Brian Haskins he’s called. Mr Ashaf says he wouldn’t trust him, but actually Dolores is no fool.’

‘Let’s go down now, Mum.’

She said she’d like to see the other dormitories. She’d like to see the senior dormitories, into one of which Michael would eventually be moving. She began to talk about Dolores Welsh and Brian Haskins again and then about Mrs Malone, and then about a woman Michael had never heard of before, a person called Peggy Urch.

He pointed out that the dormitories were called after imperial heroes. His was Drake, others were Ralegh, Nelson, Wellington, Marlborough and Clive. ‘I think I’ll be moving to Nelson,’ Michael said. ‘Or Marlborough. Depends.’ But he knew she wasn’t listening, he knew she hadn’t taken in the fact that the dormitories were named like that. She was talking about Peggy Urch when he led her into Marlborough. Outsize Dorothy was there with Miss Trenchard, taking stuff out of Verschoyle’s locker because Verschoyle had just gone to the sanatorium.

‘Very nice person,’ Michael’s mother was saying. ‘She’s taken on the Redmans’ flat – the one above us, you know.’

It seemed to Michael that his mother didn’t see Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard. It seemed to him for a moment that his mother didn’t quite know where she was.

‘Looking for me?’ Outsize Dorothy said. She smiled and waddled towards them. She looked at Michael, waiting for him to explain who this visitor was. Miss Trenchard looked, too.

‘It’s my mother,’ he said, aware that these words were inept and inelegant.

‘I’m Mrs Lyng,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She held out her hand and Michael’s mother took it.

‘The Matron,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of you, Mrs Lyng.’

‘Well actually,’ Outsize Dorothy contradicted with a laugh, ‘I’m the headmaster’s wife.’ All the flesh on her body wobbled when she laughed. Tichbourne said he knew for a fact she was twenty stone.

‘What a lovely place you have, Mrs Lyng. I was just saying to Michael. What a view from the windows!’

Outsize Dorothy told Miss Trenchard to go on getting Verschoyle’s things together, in a voice that implied that Miss Trenchard wasn’t paid to stand about doing nothing in the dormitories. All the women staff – the maids and Sister and Miss Arland and Miss Trenchard – hated Outsize Dorothy because she’d expect them, even Sister, to go on rooting in a locker while she talked to a parent. She wouldn’t in a million years say: ‘This is Miss Trenchard, the undermatron.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid we don’t have much time for views at Elton,’ Outsize Dorothy said. She was looking puzzled, and Michael imagined she was thinking that his mother was surely another woman, a thinner, smarter, quieter person. But then Outsize Dorothy wasn’t clever, as she often light-heartedly said herself, and was probably saying to herself that she must be confusing one boy’s mother with another.

‘Dorothy!’ a voice called out, a voice which Michael instantly and to his horror recognized as A.J.L.’s.

‘We had such a view at home!’ Michael’s mother said. ‘Such a gorgeous view!’ She was referring to her own home, a rectory in Somerset somewhere. She’d often told Michael about the rectory and the view, and her parents, both dead now. Her father had received the call to the Church late in life: he’d been in the Customs and Excise before that.

‘Here, dear,’ Outsize Dorothy called out. ‘In Marlborough.’

Michael knew he’d gone red in the face. His stomach felt hot also, the palms of his hands were clammy. He could hear the clatter of the headmaster’s footsteps on the uncarpeted back stairs. He began to pray, asking for something to happen, anything at all, anything God could think of.

His mother was more animated than before. More fluffy hair had slipped out from beneath her headscarf, the flush had spread over a greater area of her face. She was talking about the lack of view from the flat where she and Michael lived in Hammersmith, and about Peggy Urch who’d come to live in the flat directly above them and whose view was better because she could see over the poplars.

‘Hullo,’ A.J.L. said, a stringy, sandy man, the opposite of Outsize Dorothy and in many ways the perfect complement. Tichbourne said he often imagined them naked in bed, A.J.L. winding his stringiness around her explosive bulk.

Hands were shaken again. ‘Having a look round?’ A.J.L. said. ‘Staying at the Grand?’

Michael’s mother said she wasn’t staying at the Grand but at Sans Souci, did he know it? They’d been talking about views, she said, it was lovely to have a room with a view, she hoped Michael wasn’t giving trouble, her husband of course – well, ex-husband now – had been to this school in his time, before going on to Radley. Michael would probably go to Radley too.

‘Well, we hope so,’ A.J.L. said, seizing the back of Michael’s neck. ‘Shown her the new classrooms, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Shown her where we’re going to have our swimming-pool?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Well, then.’

His mother spoke of various diseases Michael had had, measles and whooping cough and chicken-pox, and of diseases he hadn’t had, mumps in particular. Miss Trenchard was like a ghost, all in white, still sorting out the junk in Verschoyle’s locker, not daring to say a word. She was crouched there, with her head inside the locker, listening to everything.

‘Well, we mustn’t keep you,’ A.J.L. said, shaking hands again with Michael’s mother. ‘Always feel free to come.’

There was such finality about these statements, more in the headmaster’s tone than in the words themselves, that Michael’s mother was immediately silent. The statements had a physical effect on her, as though quite violently they had struck her across the face. When she spoke again it was in the whisper she had earlier employed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m ever so sorry for going on so.’

A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy laughed, pretending not to understand what she meant. Miss Trenchard would tell Miss Arland. Sister would hear and so would Brookie, and the P.T. instructor would say that this same woman had imagined him to be one of the boys. Mr Waydelin would hear, and Square-jaw Simpson – Cocky Marshall’s successor – and Mr Brine and the Reverend Green.

‘I have enjoyed it,’ Michael’s mother whispered. ‘So nice to meet you.’

He went before her down the back stairs. His face was still red. They passed by the staff lavatory and the kitchens, out on to the concrete quadrangle. It was still misty and cold.

‘I bought things for lunch,’ she said, and for an awful moment he thought that she’d want to eat them somewhere in the school or in the grounds – in the art-room or the cricket pavilion. ‘We could have a picnic in my room,’ she said.

They walked down the short drive, past the chapel that once had been the gate-lodge. They caught a bus after a wait of half an hour, during which she began to talk again, telling him more about Peggy Urch, who reminded her of another friend she’d had once, a Margy Bassett. In her room in Sans Souci she went on talking, spreading out on the bed triangles of cheese, and tomatoes and rolls and biscuits and oranges. They sat in her room when they’d finished, eating Rollo. At six o’clock they caught a bus back to Elton Grange. She wept a little when she said goodbye.

Michael’s mother did not, as it happened, ever arrive at Elton Grange at half-term again. There was no need for her to do so because his father and Gillian were always able to come themselves. For several terms he felt embarrassed in the presence of A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard, but no one at school mentioned the unfortunate visit, not even Swagger Browne, who had so delightedly overheard her assuming the P.T. instructor to be one of the boys. School continued as before and so did the holidays, Saturdays in Cranleigh and the rest of the week in Hammersmith, news of Mr Ashaf and Dolores Welsh, now Dolores Haskins. Peggy Urch, the woman in the flat upstairs, often came down for a chat.

Often, too, Michael and his mother would sit together in the evenings on the sofa in front of the electric fire. She’d tell him about the rectory in Somerset and her father who had received the call to the Church late in his life, who’d been in the Customs and Excise. She’d tell him about her own childhood, and even about the early days of her marriage. Sometimes she wept a little, hardly at all, and he would take her arm on the sofa and she would smile and laugh. When they sat together on the sofa or went out together, to the cinema, or for a walk by the river or to the teashop called the Maids of Honour near Kew Gardens, Michael felt that he would never want to marry because he’d prefer to be with his mother. Even when she chatted on to some stranger in the Maids of Honour he felt he loved her: everything was different from the time she’d come to Elton Grange because away from Elton Grange things didn’t matter in the same way.

Then something unpleasant threatened. During his last term at Elton Grange Michael was to be confirmed. ‘Oh, but of course I must come,’ his mother said.

It promised to be worse than the previous occasion. After the service you were meant to bring your parents in to tea in the Great Hall and see that they had a cup of tea and sandwiches and cakes. You had to introduce them to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Michael imagined all that. In bed at night he imagined his father and Gillian looking very smart, his father chatting easily to Mr Brine, Gillian smiling at Outsize Dorothy, and his mother’s hair fluffing out from beneath her headscarf. He imagined his mother and his father and Gillian having to sit together in a pew in chapel, as naturally they’d be expected to, being members of the same party.

‘There’s no need to,’ he said in the flat in Hammersmith. ‘There’s really no need to, Mum.’

She didn’t mention his father and Gillian, although he’d repeatedly said that they’d be there. It was as if she didn’t want to think about them, as if she was deliberately pretending that they’d decided not to attend. She’d stay in Sans Souci again, she said. They’d have a picnic in her room, since the newly confirmed were to be excused school tea on the evening of the service. ‘Dinner at the Grand, old chap,’ his father said. ‘Bring Tichbourne if you want to.’

Michael returned to Elton Grange at the end of the Easter holidays, leaving his mother in a state of high excitement at Paddington Station because she’d be seeing him again within five weeks. He thought he might invent an illness a day or two before the confirmation, or say at the last moment that he had doubts. In fact, he did hint to the Reverend Green that he wasn’t certain about being quite ready for the occasion, but the Reverend Green sharply told him not to be silly. Every time he went down on his knees at the end of a session with the Reverend Green he prayed that God might come to his rescue. But God did not, and all during the night before the confirmation service he lay awake. It wasn’t just because she was weepy and embarrassing, he thought: it was because she dressed in that cheap way, it was because she was common, with a common voice that wasn’t at all like Gillian’s or Mrs Tichbourne’s or Mrs Carson’s or even Outsize Dorothy’s. He couldn’t prevent these thoughts from occurring. Why couldn’t she do something about her fluffy hair? Why did she have to gabble like that? ‘I think I have a temperature,’ he said in the morning, but when Sister took it it was only 98.

Before the service the other candidates waited outside the chapel to greet their parents and godparents, but Michael went into the chapel early and took up a devout position. Through his fingers he saw the Reverend Green lighting the candles and preparing the altar. Occasionally, the Reverend Green glanced at Michael, somewhat suspiciously.

‘Defend, O Lord, this Thy child,’ said the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and when Michael walked back to his seat he kept his head down, not wanting to see his parents and Gillian. They sang Hymn 459. ‘My God, accept,’ sang Michael, ‘my heart this day.’

He walked with Swagger Browne down the aisle, still with his eyes down. ‘Fantastic,’ said Swagger Browne outside the chapel, for want of anything better to say. ‘Bloody fantastic.’ They waited for the congregation to come out.

Michael had godparents, but his father had said that they wouldn’t be able to attend. His godmother had sent him a prayer-book.

‘Well done,’ his father said. ‘Well done, Mike.’

‘What lovely singing!’ Gillian murmured. She was wearing a white dress with a collar that was slightly turned up, and a white wide-rimmed hat. On the gravel outside the chapel she put on dark glasses against the afternoon sun.

‘Your mother’s here somewhere,’ his father said. ‘You’d better see to her, Mike.’ He spoke quietly, with a hand resting for a moment on Michael’s shoulder. ‘We’ll be all right,’ he added.

Michael turned. She was standing alone, as he knew she would be. Unable to prevent himself, he wished she wouldn’t always wear head-scarves. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said.

She took his hands and pulled him towards her. She kissed him, apologizing for the embrace but saying that it was a special occasion. She wished her father were alive, she said.

‘Tea in the Great Hall,’ A.J.L. was booming, and Outsize Dorothy was waddling about in flowered yellow, smiling at the faces of parents and godparents. ‘Do come and have tea,’ she gushed.

‘Oh, I’d love a cup of tea,’ Michael’s mother whispered.

The crowd was moving through the sunshine, suited men, the Reverend Green in his cassock, the Bishop in crimson, women in their garden-party finery. They walked up the short drive from the chapel. They passed through the wide gothic arch that heralded the front door, through the vestibule where the croquet set was tidily in place and the deck-chairs neat against a wall. They entered what A.J.L. had years ago christened the Great Hall, where buttered buns and sandwiches and cakes and sausage-rolls were laid out on trestle tables. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were in charge of two silver-plated tea-urns.

‘I’ll get you something to eat,’ Michael said to his mother, leaving her although he knew she didn’t want to be left. ‘Seems no time since I was getting done myself,’ he heard his father saying to A.J.L.

Miss Arland poured a cup of tea for his mother and told him to offer her something to eat. He chose a plate of sausage-rolls. She smiled at him. ‘Don’t go away again,’ she whispered.

But he had to go away again because he couldn’t stand there holding the sausage-rolls. He darted back to the table and left the plate there, taking one for himself. When he returned to his mother she’d been joined by the Reverend Green and the Bishop.

The Bishop shook Michael’s hand and said it had been a very great pleasure to confirm him.

‘My father was in the Church,’ Michael’s mother said, and Michael knew that she wasn’t going to stop now. He watched her struggling to hold the words back, crumbling the pastry of her sausage-roll beneath her fingers. The flush had come into her cheeks, there was a brightness in her eyes. The Bishop’s face was kind: she couldn’t help herself, when kindness like that was there.

‘We really must be moving,’ the Reverend Green said, but the Bishop only smiled, and on and on she went about her father and the call he’d received so late in life. ‘I’m sure you knew him, my lord,’ was one suggestion she made, and the Bishop kindly agreed that he probably had.

‘Mrs Grainer would like to meet the Bishop,’ Outsize Dorothy murmured to the Reverend Green. She looked at Michael’s mother and Michael could see her remembering her and not caring for her.

‘Well, if you’ll excuse us,’ the Reverend Green said, seizing the Bishop’s arm.

‘Oh Michael dear, isn’t that a coincidence!’

There was happiness all over her face, bursting from her eyes, in her smile and her flushed cheeks and her fluffy hair. She turned to Mr and Mrs Tichbourne, who were talking to Mrs Carson, and said the Bishop had known her father, apparently quite well. She hadn’t even been aware that it was to be this particular bishop today, it hadn’t even occurred to her while she’d been at the confirmation service that such a coincidence could be possible. Her father had passed away fifteen years ago, he’d have been a contemporary of the Bishop’s. ‘He was in the Customs and Excise,’ she said, ‘before he received the call.’

They didn’t turn away from her. They listened, putting in a word or two, about coincidences and the niceness of the Bishop. Tichbourne and Carson stood eating sandwiches, offering them to one another. Michael’s face felt like a bonfire.

‘We’ll probably see you later,’ Mr Tichbourne said, eventually edging his wife away. ‘We’re staying at the Grand.’

‘Oh no, I’m at Sans Souci. Couldn’t ever afford the Grand!’ She laughed.

‘Don’t think we know the Sans Souci,’ Mrs Tichbourne said.

‘Darling, I’d love another cup of tea,’ his mother said to Michael, and he went away to get her one, leaving her with Mrs Carson. When he returned she was referring to Peggy Urch.

It was then, while talking to Mrs Carson, that Michael’s mother fell. Afterwards she said that she’d felt something slimy under one of her heels and had moved to rid herself of it. The next thing she knew she was lying on her back on the floor, soaked in tea.

Mrs Carson helped her to her feet. A.J.L. hovered solicitously. Outsize Dorothy picked up the cup and saucer.

‘I’m quite all right,’ Michael’s mother kept repeating. ‘There was something slippy on the floor, I’m quite all right.’

She was led to a chair by A.J.L. ‘I think we’d best call on Sister,’ he said. ‘Just to be sure.’

But she insisted that she was all right, that there was no need to go bothering Sister. She was as white as a sheet.

Michael’s father and Gillian came up to her and said they were sorry. Michael could see Tichbourne and Carson nudging one another, giggling. For a moment he thought of running away, hiding in the attics or something. Half a buttered bun had got stuck to the sleeve of his mother’s maroon coat when she’d fallen. Her left leg was saturated with tea.

‘We’ll drive you into town,’ his father said. ‘Horrible thing to happen.’

‘It’s just my elbow,’ his mother whispered. ‘I came down on my elbow.’

Carson and Tichbourne would imitate it because Carson and Tichbourne imitated everything. They’d stand there, pretending to be holding a cup of tea, and suddenly they’d be lying flat on their backs. ‘I think we’d best call on Sister,’ Carson would say, imitating A.J.L.

His father and Gillian said goodbye to Outsize Dorothy and to A.J.L. His mother, reduced to humble silence again, seemed only to want to get away. In the car she didn’t say anything at all and when they reached Sans Souci she didn’t seem to expect Michael to go in with her. She left the car, whispering her thanks, a little colour gathering in her face again.

That evening Michael had dinner with Gillian and his father in the Grand. Tichbourne was there also, and Carson, and several other boys, all with their parents. ‘I can drive a few of them back,’ his father said, ‘save everyone getting a car out.’ He crossed the dining-room floor and spoke to Mr Tichbourne and Mr Carson and the father of a boy called Mallabedeely. Michael ate minestrone soup and chicken with peas and roast potatoes. Gillian told him what the twins had been up to and said his father was going to have a swimming-pool put in. His father returned to the table and announced that he’d arranged to drive everyone back at nine o’clock.

Eating his chicken, he imagined his mother in Sans Souci, sitting on the edge of the bed, probably having a cry. He imagined her bringing back to London the stuff she’d bought for a picnic in her room. She’d never refer to any of that, she’d never upbraid him for going to the Grand for dinner when she’d wanted him to be with her. She’d consider it just that she should be punished.

As they got into the car, his father said he’d drive round by Sans Souci so that Michael could run in for a minute. ‘We’re meant to be back by a quarter past,’ Michael said quickly. ‘I’ve said goodbye to her,’ he added, which wasn’t quite true.

It would perhaps have been different if Tichbourne and Carson hadn’t been in the car. He’d have gone in and paused with her for a minute because he felt pity for her. But the unattractive façade of Sans Souci, the broken gate of the small front garden and the fishermen gnomes would have caused further nudging and giggling in his father’s white Alfa-Romeo.

‘You’re sure now?’ his father said. ‘I’ll get you there by a quarter past.’

‘No, it’s all right.’

She wouldn’t be expecting him. She wouldn’t even have unpacked the picnic she’d brought.

‘Hey, was that your godmother?’ Tichbourne asked in the dormitory. ‘The one who copped it on the floor?’

He began to shake his head and then he paused and went on shaking it. An aunt, he said, some kind of aunt, he wasn’t sure what the relationship was. He hadn’t thought of saying that before, yet it seemed so simple, and so right and so natural, that a distant aunt should come to a confirmation service and not stay, like everyone else, in the Grand. ‘God, it was funny,’ Carson said, and Tichbourne did his imitation, and Michael laughed with his friends. He was grateful to them for assuming that such a person could not be his mother. A.J.L. and Outsize Dorothy and Miss Trenchard knew she was his mother, and so did the Reverend Green, but for the remainder of his time at Elton Grange none of these people would have cause to refer to the fact in public. And if by chance A.J.L. did happen to say in class tomorrow that he hoped his mother was all right after her fall, Michael would say afterwards that A.J.L. had got it all wrong.

In the dark, he whispered to her in his mind. He said he was sorry, he said he loved her better than anyone.