Selected Stories полностью

‘Olivier,’ the prefect interrupted the blankness that followed these reflections. ‘Jam.’

Olivier reached for the dish of apple jam, apologizing. She was a woman in late middle age now, tall, with grey hair tied back behind her cap, her features still touched with a trace of the beauty other boys had known. Olivier understood – had come to understand when first he’d been interested in her – why she was different from the other maids. It was not just the tales that lingered from the past, nor the reminder in her features that these were not exaggerated, nor her preference for silence when the other maids chattered in carefully guarded dining-hall whispers. There was something else, belonging only to her. Again her glance caught his, too far away for Olivier to be certain that it did so intentionally, but he was certain anyway.

The grey sausage meat within his pastry smelt a bit; not that it was bad, Olivier knew, for the smell was of sausage and of meat; only that the cooking had drawn some excess of natural odour from it. The first time she’d looked in his direction he hadn’t recognized her and would have passed her by because she wasn’t in her uniform. Often since, he’d noticed her on the back drive, alone on her afternoon off or when her duties for the day were done, not in a bunch as the others usually were. She never smiled, nothing like that, and he didn’t himself.

There was the clatter of standing up, the benches pushed back from the tables, the shuffling of shoes on polished boards. ‘. . . per Christum Dominum nostrum,’ the Senior Prefect intoned and then there were the evening’s announcements, the duty master hurrying off, the prefects going when the announcements finished, one falling in behind another, interrupted conversations picked up as the dining hall emptied but for the maids.

It would not be the birds again. There was always a variation, and Olivier had once tried to guess what the next transgression would be, but had failed hopelessly. He would not be here when it occurred, and he imagined returning for some Old Boys’ event and hearing something casually mentioned. He imagined not quite knowing what had happened and having to ask outright in the end. For a moment he wanted to reassure his friends that the new birds were safe, that there would not be a repetition. But he desisted. It was a time for cigarettes again, and the seven trooped off to the stone hut they had built for that purpose, out of sight in a corner of a field.

That evening the Headmaster himself spoke at compline, which on rare occasions he did. He told a parable of his own invention: how a man, repeating every day of his life a certain pattern of behaviour, made the pattern richer. He told of how, in a dream, this man had deviated once from his chosen way and been harshly judged by God, and punished with failure where all his life there had been success before.

Olivier recognized in the words a faintly apposite note and wondered if inspiration for them had perhaps come from his own deviation, and subsequent failure, in the realm of science. In ending his address, the Headmaster did not omit to include a reference to the value of tradition, claiming for it and for the school it ruled a potency that must surely be the approval of the God who punished when displeased. The Headmaster’s philosophy did not vary except in the allegorical garb of his discourse. It was a circle that came full, ending where it had begun: with the school and its time-worn customs, tried and true, that made men of boys.

Later, in scanning a Horace ode with the aid of a Kelly’s Key, Olivier found himself distracted, in turn, by the Headmaster’s overwhelming confidence in the established rites of passage through his school and by the dining-hall maid’s transgressions. Were her sins the weaponry of insurrection, intended as such or simply so because they happened? What passed through her thoughts as she implemented another disturbance or discomfort? And why was it that the Headmaster’s beliefs and a woman’s recidivistic stratagems seemed now to cling together like proximate jigsaw pieces? Angustam amice pauperiem pati, robustus acri militia puer condiscat, Horace had written; and Olivier matched Latin and English as best he could, his key’s translation not being word for word.

Of course, the Headmaster did not know – as authority before him had not known – that the dining-hall maid had in her girlhood been, herself, a fragment of tradition, supplying to boys who now were men a service that had entered the unofficial annals. There was that too, Olivier reminded himself, before he returned to winkling out which word went with which.