point of what Bobby could learn by gazing around him.
This was not encouraging. The entire staff of a place like Overcombe of course numbered no more than a dozen, and Bobby saw hardly anybody, apart from the joint proprietors, who was not quite young. Presumably nobody who could help himself stuck this sort of servitude indefinitely. There were two young women who clearly ran the domestic side. These were rather attractive, and might have achieved a good deal of Bobby’s attention had he not (in that department of the masculine psyche) been so tied up with the vanished girl. There were two almost middle-aged men whom he somehow guessed hadn’t been at the school for long; they looked highly intelligent, and must therefore belong to that class of persons who drift into humble employment through some sheer inability to manage their own lives. They would know nothing about Bloody Nauze. Nor would any of the others. Bobby had certainly never set eyes on any of them before, and they were far too junior to have memories stretching back a dozen years. Or all of them – Bobby suddenly saw – except old Hartsilver.
Old Hartsilver had been the art master – and so not thought of as a master at all. Except when ragging around in the art room, one hadn’t much noticed Hartsilver. (Indeed, one hadn’t very much noticed him then, either.) And it had taken Bobby all this time to notice him now. He sat at the head of a table given over to the very smallest boys. It looked as if he enjoyed at least one advantage over his colleagues, since he was clearly without any awareness whatever of what he ate. Bobby remembered him as living in a dream. Perhaps it was a dream of the pictures he was never going to paint. For when he was quite a young man something dreadful had begun to happen to Hartsilver’s central nervous system – at least Bobby thought it was that – so that his hands had ceased at all adequately to obey his will. Not without evidence of agonizing effort, he could control a gross tremor through the seconds necessary for showing a child how to correct the perspective of a cube, or hatch in a shadow, or recover a high-light with an india-rubber. That had been old Hartsilver then, and that was doubtless old Hartsilver now. Because he had been remote and withdrawn and gentle, the boys had teased him mercilessly. At the same time, Bobby now remembered, they had comported themselves with a flawless delicacy in any situation directly involving his disability. Bobby (or rather Robert, promising novelist) felt a sudden envy of those writers – Joyce Cary, Forrest Reid, Richard Hughes, William Golding – who could really ‘do’ children. There hardly existed a richer, more marvellous world.
But Hartsilver had scarcely slipped within Bobby’s observation before he slipped out again. His place was empty; his crumpled table-napkin was being folded by the small boy next to whom he had sat; he himself had departed before the meal had reached its noisy end. Probably by this time Hartsilver didn’t even handle knives and forks too well, so that eating in public was a trial to him. But it was something that an art master – the humblest of all ushers in a private school – had to make the best of, no doubt. It seemed to Bobby that it would be civilized to try and have a word with Hartsilver. And of course it looked as if Hartsilver was the one man who might tell him something about Nauze.
Dr Gulliver, it turned out, was minded to say goodbye to his visiting Old Boy at the end of the meal. This was fair enough, even taking into account the fact that he had extracted from Bobby a cheque for five pounds towards the cost of some building-operation which was probably entirely mythical. Headmasters are supposed to be very busy men, and it was proper that Gulliver should sustain that impression of himself. All the same, Bobby had a feeling that he was being invited to clear out less on Gulliver’s instance than on Onslow’s – and
This was not encouraging. The entire staff of a place like Overcombe of course numbered no more than a dozen, and Bobby saw hardly anybody, apart from the joint proprietors, who was not quite young. Presumably nobody who could help himself stuck this sort of servitude indefinitely. There were two young women who clearly ran the domestic side. These were rather attractive, and might have achieved a good deal of Bobby’s attention had he not (in that department of the masculine psyche) been so tied up with the vanished girl. There were two almost middle-aged men whom he somehow guessed hadn’t been at the school for long; they looked highly intelligent, and must therefore belong to that class of persons who drift into humble employment through some sheer inability to manage their own lives. They would know nothing about Bloody Nauze. Nor would any of the others. Bobby had certainly never set eyes on any of them before, and they were far too junior to have memories stretching back a dozen years. Or all of them – Bobby suddenly saw – except old Hartsilver.
Old Hartsilver had been the art master – and so not thought of as a master at all. Except when ragging around in the art room, one hadn’t much noticed Hartsilver. (Indeed, one hadn’t very much noticed him then, either.) And it had taken Bobby all this time to notice him now. He sat at the head of a table given over to the very smallest boys. It looked as if he enjoyed at least one advantage over his colleagues, since he was clearly without any awareness whatever of what he ate. Bobby remembered him as living in a dream. Perhaps it was a dream of the pictures he was never going to paint. For when he was quite a young man something dreadful had begun to happen to Hartsilver’s central nervous system – at least Bobby thought it was that – so that his hands had ceased at all adequately to obey his will. Not without evidence of agonizing effort, he could control a gross tremor through the seconds necessary for showing a child how to correct the perspective of a cube, or hatch in a shadow, or recover a high-light with an india-rubber. That had been old Hartsilver then, and that was doubtless old Hartsilver now. Because he had been remote and withdrawn and gentle, the boys had teased him mercilessly. At the same time, Bobby now remembered, they had comported themselves with a flawless delicacy in any situation directly involving his disability. Bobby (or rather Robert, promising novelist) felt a sudden envy of those writers – Joyce Cary, Forrest Reid, Richard Hughes, William Golding – who could really ‘do’ children. There hardly existed a richer, more marvellous world.
But Hartsilver had scarcely slipped within Bobby’s observation before he slipped out again. His place was empty; his crumpled table-napkin was being folded by the small boy next to whom he had sat; he himself had departed before the meal had reached its noisy end. Probably by this time Hartsilver didn’t even handle knives and forks too well, so that eating in public was a trial to him. But it was something that an art master – the humblest of all ushers in a private school – had to make the best of, no doubt. It seemed to Bobby that it would be civilized to try and have a word with Hartsilver. And of course it looked as if Hartsilver was the one man who might tell him something about Nauze.
Dr Gulliver, it turned out, was minded to say goodbye to his visiting Old Boy at the end of the meal. This was fair enough, even taking into account the fact that he had extracted from Bobby a cheque for five pounds towards the cost of some building-operation which was probably entirely mythical. Headmasters are supposed to be very busy men, and it was proper that Gulliver should sustain that impression of himself. All the same, Bobby had a feeling that he was being invited to clear out less on Gulliver’s instance than on Onslow’s – and
Similar Books
