The Last Summer Read online

  Malcolm swallowed but said nothing.

  “I have never, never, never,” said Mr Twigg, “never seen anything so scandalous in all my days. I wouldn’t have believed it possible. Not possible.”

  He slammed his finger down so hard on the paper that he seemed to wrench it. He went a deeper shade of pale but showed no other sign of the pain.

  “If you had only written something pleasant, something moral, something decent, such as W. H. Davies might have written, something humorous, something healthy and pleasant, suitable for a school magazine in those days of shortage of paper. I’m not against humour; no one can say I’m against humour—in its place—but this is an offence against the dead. You are lucky, I tell you you are lucky, that I have decided not to report you to the rector and that only because of your record, because of your previous record, before this aberration.”

  His moustache quivered, the hairs like antennae, searching.

  “I cannot understand that you … one of my best pupils, one of my best pupils at interpretation, and also at the descriptive essay, should have written this. I do not and cannot understand. Well, what do you say? What have you to say?”

  In truth, Malcolm couldn’t understand how he should have written it. And yet he had. And he had enjoyed writing it, too.

  He wanted to wipe the specks of foam from his face, but didn’t.

  “Anyway, it can’t go on. And you a member of the committee! Setting such an example. What if the younger children had read it, eh? I am ashamed of you. Ashamed. Ashamed of you.”

  The face seemed to pale even more, and for a moment Malcolm thought that Mr Twigg was going to faint, for the latter put his hand to his chest, shaking. Mr Twigg turned away, gesturing speechlessly while he slipped a white pill into his mouth.

  Malcolm slunk off.

  They crowded round him. On the rim of the ring he saw Janet, looking at him and laughing darkly.

  “What happened? What was that in aid of?” said Neil. Neil was the scientist of the class, best at physics, chemistry and mathematics. He had a dark competent air and would probably be an engineer.

  “C-come on,” stuttered fat Jerry, “what was it all about, eh?” his slobbery body shaking, his glasses glittering, his loose mouth avid for scandal.

  “An article I wrote,” said Malcolm, airily. He looked down at his flannels and at the shadow he cast on the earth, in front of the dappled wall. Miriam was watching him too with her trim neat gaze, in her long white pleated skirt.

  “What was it?” they insisted. “What was it about? It must have been bad.”

  “It was just an imitation of In Memoriams.”

  Now that he came to think of it, the article hadn’t been all that good.

  “What?”

  “I just took all the In Memoriams you get in the paper and I did a take off. That’s all.”

  He looked carefully down at his brown shoes, watching Janet out of the corner of his eye. Her black hair stirred in the breeze, her face tanned as a Red Indian’s.

  She stood there, her arm resting lightly on the shoulder of another girl. To be so beautiful. What must it be like to be so beautiful? To wake up and know that you were beautiful. To know that all the people would bow and kneel to you. To be so continually desired. To know that your every movement was followed by eyes of lust. What was it like to live in such a world? To watch yourself endlessly in a mirror.

  “Tell us one,” said Jerry, rapturously. “Tell us one before the bell goes. Go on.”

  That fat slob, that fat clever slob, Jerry.

  “All right,” he said, carelessly. “They’re not going to be printed anyway.”

  He struck an attitude:

  To think we’ll never see your face

  as we did see of yore

  when you would come at eventide

  so happy through the door.

  “That was one of them,” he said, in a shamefaced way. It didn’t really sound so good.

  “How disgusting,” said Miriam, walking away with a flounce. “Disgusting,” flicking her pony tail angrily.

  Some of the others burst out laughing. Janet looked at him with what seemed to be admiration.

  She came forward. “You mean,” she said, “that you handed that in to Mr Twigg?”

  There seemed to be a dew on her lips.

  “Yes,” he answered joyously, the hero.

  She laughed. “Well, good for you.”

  But there was a puzzlement in her laughter.

  “Another one,” stuttered Jerry. “Have you another one?”

  “Well, I don’t …”

  Really, this was going a bit far. And they weren’t as good as that, when you studied them closely. He said:

  There always is a vacant space

  where once there was your seat

  and we will love you more and more

  though we can’t see your feet.

  Jerry went into a fat paroxysm of laughter, his whole face seeming to disintegrate. Neil smiled coolly. After a while, Jerry took off his glasses and began to polish them with a dirty handkerchief.

  “What did Old Twiggy say?” said Neil.

  “Oh, he nearly had hysterics,” said Malcolm casually. “I thought he was going to drop dead in front of me. He took a pill.”

  Suddenly little James pushed forward and said furtively: “You know, when I was in first year he sent me to a chemist’s shop for stomach … stomach powders.”

  They all burst out laughing, thinking of this and also thinking of being in first year.

  Janet came up to him: “You shouldn’t have said that, you know,” she said.

  Her eyes glinted as if she were testing him.

  “What?” he asked. “Shouldn’t have said what?”

  “Didn’t you know that Miriam lost her father recently?”

  Funny how when Janet said this she seemed to be triumphing over him, as if she wanted to defeat him in his moment of glory.

  “Is that true?” he asked excitedly. “Is that true?” But at the same moment he put on his armour of callousness. “I didn’t know about that. I mean, it wasn’t against her …”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” said Jerry, his eyes glinting as well. “It took g-guts you know to do that. Anyway, it’s just satire. It’s not meant for her.”

  One of the girls said: “Jerry doesn’t mind if old Twigg puts you off the committee. He wants to get on it himself.”

  “That’s dirty, that’s dirty,” said Jerry hysterically. “That’s dirty.”

  “I think he’s leaving me on the committee,” said Malcolm, thinking about Miriam running away in her long white skirt, her pony tail tossing.

  The bell rang and they all walked away, except for Janet who waited. With his heart in his mouth he said to her:

  “I’ll get you a piece of turnip this afternoon.”

  She didn’t say anything, not even signifying that she had heard him. But all the time he was thinking of Miriam running away and saying: “Disgusting”, and that fat Jerry who wanted to be on the committee himself, and who might get a good bursary all because he was good at French and German.

  He wished he could be like Neil, who hardly ever spoke; the strong silent man, the Horatio who would have a pipe in his mouth as he told his underlings where the struts of the bridge were to be put, somewhere in India perhaps.

  And there was himself shooting off his mouth and he couldn’t even understand why he had done it.

  Suddenly, he blurted out: “Do you think it was wrong?”

  She looked at him, mockingly, and said: “It was very clever. But I must hurry. We’ve got gym.”

  The wind moved over her dress. The shadows played on her face. The sun shone all round her. Persephone. And in a moment he had forgotten about Mr Twigg. His flannels fluttered in the breeze and he wanted to be playing football, racing down the wing, devious, cunning, the studs of his boots like eagles’ claws, the ball soaring towards the net beyond outstretched hands, and Janet watching him.
r />   “I’m not sorry,” he shouted, but by that time it was too late.

  She was gone in a burst of yellow flame.

  6

  MALCOLM WOULD OFTEN go and visit Dicky, who had come home from the Army with TB and was dying from it. Malcolm was terrified of TB—of the visible wasting whiteness, like a candle guttering—but nevertheless he forced himself to go. The two of them would play draughts: so far he hadn’t won a game against Dicky. He knew there was a lot of haemorrhaging in TB and in fact Dicky had been taken off the ship in a stretcher, haemorrhaging badly, and this terrified Malcolm so much that one night he had wakened up in the bed beside his brother, feeling that he was being choked by blood. His brother hadn’t even wakened, his skull yellow in the moonlight. Before Dicky had taken to his bed, he and Malcolm would walk along the road in the warm summer evenings. On these evenings they would reach the corner of the road before turning back, and would discuss books and local gossip; anything but the war. Though Dicky had left school at fifteen he was very intelligent and had read modern books.

  This particular afternoon Dicky was sitting in a chair, wrapped in a muffler, though it was quite warm outside where the cows were munching the grass round the house and the butterflies swooped after each other, above the white and red flowers. The sea’s lazy swell could be seen moving towards the shore. Malcolm didn’t like entering the dark house of imminent death after the brightness of the sunshine, but he did.

  “How are you today?” he asked cheerfully, sitting down in a chair opposite Dicky.

  “Not too bad,” said Dicky, through the white muffler, his voice husky. There was something wrong with his throat. Dicky’s mother always welcomed Malcolm: his father was working in a mill.

  “And how is your mother today?” asked Dicky’s mother. She was a thin, dark, nervous looking woman, who seemed to have partially surrendered to whatever nightmare or tragedy was about to hit her and which was already investing the house, tightening its grip mindlessly. Her gaze could almost be described as scattered.

  “Fine, Mrs Morrison,” said Malcolm, as if apologising.

  “That’s good,” she answered, as if it were extraordinary and at the same time irritating that other people should be well when her son was so ill. At times she deluded herself into thinking that he would get well and for this reason was always feeding him milk and porridge.

  “Have you got the draughtboard?” said Malcolm, in the same cheerful voice which seemed to ring hollowly through the house, echoing among the dead white ornaments, which included a bouquet of marblish flowers and a gipsy’s cart full of needles.

  Without answering, Dicky got the board and pieces out from a drawer, which was set in the table.

  Malcolm was frightened that Mrs Morrison would offer him tea. He didn’t like eating and drinking in the house in case he got germs. For this reason he always came over just after he had had a meal.

  “What are you reading?” he asked Dicky, who held up a book with a dark red cover: it might have been a Penguin. He had a quick look at the names: Auden, Day Lewis, Chamfort. While Dicky was setting up the pieces his eye was caught by the Auden poem, which he rapidly skimmed through. He had been attracted by the opening lines which were:

  Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head

  And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I’m led …

  “I like the C. Day Lewis one,” said Dicky.

  Malcolm didn’t answer. His eye had been caught by another verse:

  The power that corrupts, that power to excess

  The beautiful quite naturally possess:

  To them the fathers and the children turn:

  And all who long for their destruction,

  The arrogant and self-insulted wait

  The looked instruction.

  What did that mean? But these lines! “The power which corrupts, that power to excess, The beautiful quite naturally possess …”

  He laid the book down on the table.

  “Auden is good, isn’t he?” he said in wonderment.

  “There’s a good one by C. Day Lewis,” said Dicky.

  “Where?”

  “It’s not in that one. It’s in another one. It’s called ‘The Conflict’.”

  “I think that poem by Auden is very good,” said Malcolm, again in wonderment, thinking “The power which corrupts, that power to excess, The beautiful quite naturally possess.”

  It was right enough, dead right. Accurate.

  Mrs Morrison was still standing at the door and she said to Malcolm:

  “It’s chilly today, isn’t it?” Malcolm looked at Dicky’s muffler and said, “Yes, it is, quite. It’s not so warm as it was yesterday,” though the sky was cloudless.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two to get on with your draughts,” said Mrs Morrison, and went off into the other room, perhaps to sew or knit or brood or whatever she did.

  “Toss for white,” said Dicky, in the same hoarse voice.

  “Yes, all right,” said Malcolm. Dicky took out a florin and won the toss.

  “I think we should learn chess sometime,” said Malcolm, carelessly. “They say it’s a difficult game.”

  “They say that,” said Dicky, bending to the board. He played a flank game always and this game was no exception. He played white on the right flank. Malcolm studied the board and after a while he played black on the right flank as well. He felt the sunlight lying on his warm right hand and when he looked down there was a mottling of white and black on it, like some kind of foliage.

  Dicky coughed behind his hand, a small dry cough. He played towards the right flank again. Malcolm did the same, looking covertly at Dicky, whose face had in the previous weeks become very thin, the cheeks sunken with a small red spot on each and the upper lip disfigured by a cold scab.

  Dicky sipped delicately from a tumbler of milk as he played to the right flank again. Malcolm wondered whether he should start sacrificing, in order to break up the movement on the right, but decided that he would duplicate the last movement as well. Both forces were now aligned along the right flank. It was up to Dicky whether he should sacrifice on his right flank. This in fact was what he did.

  While studying the board, Malcolm said: “Anything good in any of your Penguin New Writings?”

  “There’s a short story by Rex Warner,” said Dicky, coughing again slightly.

  “What’s it about?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s strange.”

  For a moment Dicky’s eyes stared across at him with a keen glitter. Malcolm almost felt hate in them. Then they clouded over and dimmed and became gentle, as if he had been struggling against some powerful force.

  As he turned his eyes back to the board again, Malcolm was wondering what it was like to be dying. Did Dicky know that he was dying? He probably did. There was an unshaven look about the face, too. In the past, Dicky had always been very neat and well groomed. Perhaps the unshaven appearance was a sign that the will was surrendering. He remembered that before going to the war Dicky had been quite a good footballer, graceful and clever.

  Suddenly Malcolm said: “I don’t understand how England can keep that team together, Matthews, Carter and Lawton. They’re never sent on war service, are they? They’re never out of England.”

  It was a sore point with him that the English were winning all the football internationals, sometimes by scores as high as 7–1.

  “They’re pretty good,” said Dicky. “You can’t stop Matthews,” he added, coughing again behind his hand. “I saw him once.”

  “You mean in the flesh?”

  “Yes, at Wembley. I saw a game there. Jock Shaw couldn’t stop him. He hadn’t an earthly.”

  Malcolm looked at him with renewed respect.

  “Imagine that,” he said, “seeing him in the flesh. Is he that good?”

  “He’s the best I’ve seen,” said Dicky, “and I saw Finney too.”

  Malcolm moved a black from the back row to strengthen his flank.

 
; “What do you think of that?” he said, cheerfully and falsely. He was instantly aware that Mrs Morrison was again standing in the doorway. She nodded to him approvingly and vanished.

  Dicky studied the board and eventually moved a white piece from his back row to strengthen his flank.

  “Hm,” said Malcolm, in an exaggerated way as if talking to a child. “Hm, I see what you’re at.”

  Dicky smiled faintly. Malcolm had never beaten him and he wanted to. He didn’t like losing at draughts because it was a game that he enjoyed playing. The thought suddenly came to him: “I hope I beat him once before he …” The thought was pushed down abruptly, squirming and wriggling like a fish at the end of a hook.

  He moved a right flank piece back towards the middle. The position was quite reasonable. He leaned back in his chair and began to whistle. Then he stopped, because he would be breathing air into his lungs and there might be germs. He leaned forward.

  The game continued. As he was playing, Malcolm was listening to the sound of the cows munching, to the swell of the sea and the hum of the insects. Dicky was as if carved from stone, except that now and then he would cough a little and tighten his lips against each other.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever beat him,” said Malcolm to himself. “This is all he has.” Suddenly he realised it fully: “This is all he has.” And then he thought: perhaps I ought to let him win again, but he wouldn’t do that out of respect for Dicky, and also because he wanted to win. But the game was very close and he had manoeuvred himself almost by chance into a strong position. He completely forgot himself, lost in the board, and listening now and then to that cough, on the edge of his consciousness.

  Without warning, the words came into his mind again:

  “That power to excess, the beautiful quite naturally possess.”

  He opened the Penguin New Writing which was lying beside him:

  Certain it became while we were still incomplete

  There were certain prizes for which we would never compete.