His daughter sweltered in her guilt. Rose was eighteen and wished, this evening, she could be somewhere else. She wished she didn’t have to meet Mr Bouverie’s weary eyes or watch him being polite, listening with inclined head to her mother, smiling at her father’s bonhomie. The occasion was a celebration: Rose was to go to university, Mr Bouverie had had a hand in her success. As a tutor, he had made borderline cases his business for more than thirty years, but intended to no longer, Rose being his last.
‘How I adore the asparagus season!’ Rose heard her mother cry in her vivacious way, pressing a dish of the vegetable, well buttered, on their visitor.
Mr Bouverie smiled and murmured his appreciation. He was a man of sixty-odd. Strands of faded hair were hardly noticeable on the freckled pate of his head. There were freckles, also, on the backs of his hands, on old worn skin like dried-out chamois. He wore a pale suit and one of his colourful Italian bow ties.
‘And how is your world, Mr Bouverie?’ Mr Dakin civilly enquired.
‘Shrinking,’ Mr Bouverie replied. ‘That is something you notice as you age.’
Mrs Dakin bubbled into good-sort laughter. Mr Dakin poured claret.
‘You shrink yourself of course.’ Mr Bouverie obligingly pursued the subject, since it was clear that the Dakins liked to have a conversation going. He smiled at Rose. Half his teeth were still his own, grey and sucked away to crags.
‘Good tidings for the obese,’ mumbled Mr Dakin, his features screwed up as they often were when he made a joke. Directed against himself, his banter caused his wife to exclaim:
‘Oh, Bobo, you’re not obese!’
‘I used to be six foot and half an inch,’ Mr Bouverie laboured on. ‘I’m nothing like that now.’
‘But otherwise all is well?’ Mr Dakin enquired.
‘Oh, yes, indeed.’
Mrs Dakin had had her dining-room papered blue, a dark stripe and a lighter one. Curtains matched, the paintwork was white. Mrs Dakin enjoyed this side of things and often said so: leafless delphiniums patterned her drawing-room; her hall and staircase were black and gold.
‘I say, this is awfully good.’ Mr Dakin complimented his wife on what she had done with the turkey slices that accompanied the asparagus.
‘Delicious,’ Mr Bouverie affirmed.
Rose wore a slate-grey dress, with a collar that folded back. Unlike her parents, Rose was petite, her fair hair cut short, a fringe following the curve of her forehead, her eyes a forget-me-not shade of blue. Her guilt, this evening, silenced her, and her smile came fleetingly and not often. When it did, her lower lip lost its bee-sting look and for an instant her white, irregular teeth appeared. She felt awkward and unpretty at the dinner table, sick of herself.
‘We cultivate it late in our garden,’ her mother was saying, still talking about the asparagus, of which Rose had taken only a single shoot. ‘Our season runs almost to September.’
What kind of an ordeal was it for him? Rose wondered. They had invited his wife as well but a message had come the day before to say that Mrs Bouverie was unwell. Rose knew that wasn’t true. His wife had seized the opportunity; she’d said to him she couldn’t be bothered, but that wasn’t true either. His wife would be naked now, Rose thought.
‘Extraordinary, what you read on cars’ rear windows,’ her mother suddenly remarked, the subject of a particular season for asparagus now exhausted. ‘
‘I think you’re being told not to drive too close,’ Rose’s father suggested.
Tinkling with unmalicious social laughter, her mother pointed out that it was an enticement to drive too close in order to read what was said.
‘They haven’t thought of that, my dear.’
In all her chosen subjects Rose had been a borderline case and every Thursday afternoon, for almost a year, had gone to Mr Bouverie’s house, where they had sat together in the bow window that looked out into the garden. Mrs Bouverie brought tea as soon as Rose arrived and while they drank it Mr Bouverie didn’t attempt to teach but instead talked about the past, about his own life when he had been about to go to university himself, and later being interviewed for a position in the worsted-cloth business. He had tried the worsted trade for a while and then had turned to schoolmastering. But something about the form of discipline and the tedium of ‘hobbies time’ – when the boys put together model aeroplanes - caused him to give it up after a year. Ever since, he had received pupils in his house, deciding only a month or so ago that Rose should be the last of them. ‘Anno Domini,’ he’d said, but Rose knew that wasn’t the reason. During all those teatimes he had spun his life out, like a serial story.
