She ripped a sleeve climbing over the stile and then managed to plunge one of her alligator-clad feet into a cow pat that would have been quite obvious to anyone else. She redeemed herself a little in Teddy’s eyes by being admirably and carelessly cheerful about both mishaps. (“I expect,” his mother said later, “that she will simply throw the offending articles away.”)
She was, however, disappointingly unimpressed by the bluebells. At Fox Corner the annual exhibition was greeted with the same reverence that others accorded the Great Masters. Visitors were trooped proudly out to the wood to admire the seemingly endless blur of blue. “Wordsworth had his daffodils,” Sylvie said, “we have our bluebells.” They weren’t their bluebells, not at all, but his mother’s character was inclined to ownership.
Walking back along the lane Teddy felt a sudden unexpected tremor in his breast, a kind of exaltation of the heart. The memory of the lark’s song and the sharp green smell of the great bouquet of bluebells that he had picked for his mother combined to make a pure moment of intoxication, a euphoria that seemed to indicate that all the mysteries were about to be revealed. (“There’s a world of light,” his sister Ursula said. “But we can’t see it for the darkness.” “Our little Manichean,” Hugh said fondly.)
The school was not, of course, unknown to him. Teddy’s brother Maurice was up at Oxford now, but when he had been at the school Teddy had often accompanied his mother (“my little chaperone”) to prize-givings and Founder’s Days and occasionally something called “Visitation” when one day each term parents were allowed—although not particularly encouraged—to visit their children. “More like a penal system than a school,” his mother scoffed. Sylvie was not as enthusiastic about the benefits of education as one might have expected her to be.
Considering his allegiance to his old school, his father showed a marked reluctance for any kind of “visitation” to his old haunts. Hugh’s absences were explained variously by being tied up with affairs at the bank, important meetings, fretful shareholders. “And so on, and so on,” Sylvie muttered. “Going back is usually more painful than going forward,” she added as the chapel organ whined its way into the introduction to “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.”
This was two years ago, the prize-giving for Maurice’s final term. Maurice had been deputy head boy, the “deputy” in his title making him choleric. “Second in command,” he had fumed when he had been appointed at the beginning of his final year. “I see myself as a commander, not a deputy.” Maurice believed himself to be made of the stuff of heroes, a man who should lead other men into battle, although he would literally sit out the next war, behind an important desk in Whitehall where the dead were simply inconvenient tables of figures to him. No one in the school chapel on that hot July day in 1923 would have believed that another war could follow so swiftly on the heels of the last. The gilding was still fresh on the names of old boys (“the Honoured Dead”) displayed on oak plaques around the chapel. “Much good may ‘honour’ do them when they’re dead,” Sylvie whispered crossly in Teddy’s ear. The Great War had made Sylvie into a pacifist, albeit a rather belligerent one.
The school chapel had been stifling, drowsiness settling on the pews like a film of dust as the headmaster’s voice droned on and on. The sun filtering through the stained-glass windows was transformed into lozenges of jewel-like colours, an artifice that was no substitute for the real thing outside. And now this would soon be Teddy’s appointed lot too. A dull prospect of endurance.
When it came to it, school life was not so bad as he had feared. He had friends and was athletic, which always led to a degree of popularity. And he was a kind boy who gave bullies no quarter and that made him popular too, but nonetheless by the time he left and went up to Oxford he had concluded that the school was a brutal and uncivilized place and he would not keep up the callous tradition with his own sons. He expected many—cheerful, loyal and strong—and received instead the distillation (or perhaps reduction) of hope that was Viola.
“Tell me more about yourself,” Izzie said, wrenching a stalk of cow parsley from the hedgerow and spoiling the moment.
“What about myself?” he puzzled, the euphoria gone, the mysteries once more veiled from view. Later, in school, he would learn Brooke’s poem “The Voice”—“The spell was broken, the key denied me” a fitting description of this moment, but by then—these sensations being ephemeral by their nature—he would have forgotten it.
“Anything,” Izzie said.
“Well, I’m eleven years old.”
“I know that, silly.” (Somehow he doubted that she did.) “What makes you you? What do you like doing? Who are your friends? Do you have a thingamajig, you know—” she said, struggling for alien vocabulary, “David and Goliath—a slingshot thingy?”
“A catapult?”
“Yes! For going around hitting people and killing things and so on.”