Chapter 21
A year later
Westminster taught Tom how to think critically; to examine all sides of an argument and coolly, calmly, break it apart.
He was grateful for that. But everything was a code he didn’t understand, and the uniform – a navy suit, with house tie – was designed to show the code of the boys whose fathers’ tailors had made their clothes.
He was not rich like Pewsey Minor, son of Richard Pewsey, scion of Pewsey’s Bank, or already a peer of the realm like Leighton, fourteenth earl of Wincanton.
He was not intellectual like Dickie Osgood, who would one day run Osgood’s, the publishers on Albemarle Street.
He was not even exotic like Ram Ahmed, head of Liddell’s House, about whom the boys constantly made jokes, which he was a sport about and took in great humour.
Being a good sport was very important. Tom’s father was from a village in the Lake District and his mother – well, who cared about Julian Caldicott, these days?
The headmaster, hearing he was from Scotland, nodded his head as though he’d said he was from the moon, and then asked him whether he’d seen any good cricket that summer.
‘Unfortunately not, sir.’
‘What about your father? He enjoy cricket?’
‘No, sir,’ said Tom, not sure how to tell him that he hadn’t seen his father for a year, and that he wasn’t sure why. ‘He’s more of a rugger man,’ he lied.
‘Very good, Raven,’ the headmaster had replied, nodding. ‘Very good.’
He’d assumed Knoll Hall, his prep school, must be a little like Westminster, but he soon saw that was like assuming you knew London because you’d been to Tunbridge Wells.
There were umpteen phrases and traditions he didn’t understand – the Greaze, Up School, ‘Remove pupil’ – so he learned to keep quiet until he knew them too, and for the rest of his life watched men who looked like him bluff their way through situations where they were out of their depth and get away with it.
But there were things about Westminster he enjoyed.
He made friends: Guy Mannering, whose father was something very high up in the Civil Service, and Antoine Renaud, who’d been at Knoll with him and whose father was an attaché to the French Embassy.
In the spring of 1960, six months after he’d joined, Guy Mannering invited him to a birthday tea. ‘The dear old pater wants to treat me. Asked me to bring a friend. We’ll go after school. Sound all right, Raven?’
‘I should say so,’ said Tom, his mouth watering at the idea, not least because meals at Montpelier Crescent had become more and more erratic and eccentric; the previous week, for example, he’d had anchovies on toast five nights in a row.
The following Tuesday they left school, crossed the road and went into the Houses of Parliament to meet Guy’s father.
‘Awful bore, hunting for Dad every time,’ said Guy, after they’d trailed round for a while, eventually being directed to the right place by a kindly police officer.
Guy’s father was in a meeting, so they waited for him, kicking their heels outside a minister’s office high up on the third floor, smog hanging over the dark grey Thames.
‘It’s deathly dull here, sorry,’ said Guy, yawning and stretching his long legs out on to the dusty green carpet.
Tom did not find it dull. He found it fascinating, from the High Victorian Gothic decorations to the identikit quiet men in pinstriped suits and black horn-rimmed glasses who brushed past them. One of them, Tom realized, was Alec Douglas-Home.
Guy’s father, when he appeared, was apologetic, jamming a hat on his head and ushering the boys out and into town in a black cab, begging them to forget his behaviour.
But Tom never forgot it. Opposite their school was Parliament, and to Guy and many other students this was quite normal: it was where their fathers spent their days.
Tom came to see that it was rather like the rugby team in Gatehouse.
He had always wanted to try rugby, but his father didn’t play and Tom didn’t know any of the other locals who did.
The boys who went to the club grew up feeling confident playing rugby and so, when they were twelve, thirteen, and it came time to select the Under-Sixteen Galloway team, the boys who had been playing rugby every weekend and at school and with their fathers and their pals were good and the boys who hadn’t had that weren’t, and Tom hadn’t had that, and so he wasn’t.
And it turned out the country was run on similar lines.
But thanks to Mr Carter, who made Maths jolly interesting, and M.
Le Maout, who gave him a life-long love both of philosophical arguments and of France, and Miss Aplin, the Art mistress, who’d been an artist’s model before the war, as well as an air-raid warden – thanks to these teachers Tom learned to train his brain, to examine what he was told, to build worlds and understand their construction.
His years in Notting Hill – where he knew everyone, more or less, and the best pie shops and record shops and the best garden squares to sneak into and play; the streets where he’d wander for hours with Gordon and trade insults with Johnny – all of that world receded.
Westminster was his life now. Afterwards, he would remember this period as speeded up, summers and school terms and interminable evenings at Montpelier Crescent flickering by as though on a screen.
For now he was waiting for one thing, which was to leave his school days behind and to get on with life, for that was the only way to escape whatever it was he had with Jenny and Henry, to forge his own path.
He wrote to his father, and his father wrote back. It wasn’t like before. But every time Tom said, Come to Sevenstones this summer, Dad! I miss you! , Edward, in his reply, never alluded to the invitation.
Jenny did not mention his father again.
Once, Edward actually came by for tea, when he was delivering a set of table and chairs to a client in Sussex.
He had a van, and Tom went inside to see the four smooth chairs, gently curving, strapped firmly against the sides.
There were a couple of woodchips on the floor, his father’s chisel and hammer and plane poking out of his neatly wound-up tool bag.
Everything was always neat, with his father.
He stayed only an hour. Jenny was perfectly civil and made him tea; Henry came out and shook his hand; and he and Tom sat in the kitchen, chatting.
‘Are you all right otherwise, old boy?’ Tom had nodded. ‘Good! Excellent!’ His father leaned forwards, patted his knees. ‘Well done. Ah, Tom.’
He had bruise-coloured half-moons under his eyes, and pale little dots across his skin.
He looked much older, and smoked incessantly.
And then he was off, waving goodbye, before Tom could say: But it’s all wrong.
And there’s something badly wrong, Dad, it’s getting worse and I don’t know who to tell.
The problem was Jenny. Something had changed in the last year or so, perhaps since he began at Westminster.
She was often ill, staying in bed for days at a time, then leaping up and painting empty rooms in the house strange meat colours or an intense teal, selling or burning furniture without telling Henry, bringing down his fury on her head.
There was the time Tom came back and an old man who sold game at Portobello Market was sitting in the kitchen calmly skinning a rabbit, his shoes resting on the range; he claimed Jenny had said he could move in.
Then came the day the men from Sotheby’s turned up while Jenny and Henry were both out.
They said Jenny had asked them to store one of Julian Caldicott’s paintings, Daphnis and Chloe Out Walking , before the sale, and Tom couldn’t stop them.
When Henry returned from wherever he’d been and saw the bare wall with only the outline on the faded wallpaper, the only clue that it had been there at all, he gave a great roar and raced upstairs to find his sister, who was in her bedroom, which was below Tom’s.
They had a huge row and he slapped her, actually slapped her.
‘For God’s sake, Jenny! What the hell is wrong with you!’
‘Leave me alone! Leave me be!’ she had screamed at him. ‘I have to do what I have to do! It has to go!’
‘Jen! You have to stop this! For Father’s sake!
For Irene’s sake! For Teddy’s sake, for Christ’s sake!
And for the boy!’ he’d said, his voice hoarse and cracking; and Tom, having hurried to where they were, stood in the doorway, his good eye straining to adjust as it sometimes did with two focal points, and saw a vignette he would never forget: his aunt, clutching her cheek and weeping, her eyes huge over her fingertips, no sense in them at all; and his uncle, fists clenched with sadness, not rage, staring with despair at her, the two of them locked together like in some Greek tragedy or biblical parable – Guy would have had the perfect comparison, but then perhaps not, for Guy came from a normal family, where they remembered birthdays and there were parents and there presumably weren’t anchovies on toast for tea five nights in a row.
If Henry was in and not out drinking somewhere, the two read in the first-floor drawing room, the only sound the wireless in the basement and the intermittent thudding of the ancient, temperamental hot-water geyser above the bath.
Neither spoke to the other, and so at some point Tom took to slipping out at night and walking up Ladbroke Grove to meet Gordon.