The Road from the Monument Read online

  The Road from The Monument

  BY

  STORM JAMESON

  Contents

  PART 1

  PAUL GATE: September 1902–September 1956

  PART 2

  THE MONUMENT: September–December 31, 1956

  PART 3

  THE RUN: January–June 3, 1957

  PART 4

  THE END OF THE RUN: June 5–22, 1957

  Part 1

  Paul Gate

  September 1902–September 1956

  Chapter One

  When Paul Gate was seventy he retired, without heartbreak, from the post he had held for more than fifty years — fifty-four — in an obscure private school living on with the obstinacy of an old half-rotted tree in an equally obscure little town on the north-east coast: Danesacre. A handful of his ex-pupils, men little if at all younger than he was, decided to stage a celebration.

  He came to the school when he was sixteen, in 1902, as what used to be called a pupil-teacher. In those days it was Dr. Liggett’s School for Gentlemen’s Sons. The title could be and was stretched to cover the nakedness of sons of tradesmen willing to pay the fees. Paul Gate paid no fees. There was nobody to pay them, he was illegitimate, and (his mother had abandoned him) a charity brat whose precocious cleverness at his Board School came to be talked of. When the talk reached Liggett’s ears, the shrewd ungenerous man he was made a half-generous gesture: young Gate was to teach the lowest class and at the same time study for the examination allowing him to enter a training-college and become a certified teacher, with a degree. This sensible plan did not work out — for the simple and strange reason that a boy who had been born a brilliant mathematician could not pass examinations. He had only to walk into the hall where the examination was being held, and sit down at his desk, for his every faculty to be seized by paralysis; he could not form an idea, he could not control his pen, he could barely see. Sweat broke through his skin, and the print on the paper under his eyes ran into an illegible blur. At his second try he fainted. After this humiliating incident — spoken of in the town as ‘Gate’s silliness’ — it was recognised that something, heaven but nobody else knew what, would always prevent him from trying again.

  He stayed on at the school. Since he could not be made a reputable member of the staff, Liggett called him ‘my Supervisor.’ He did anything, from keeping the accounts and ordering supplies to teaching. He was paid atrociously. For nearly a quarter of a century his yearly salary was fifty pounds and his keep. Later, when the school, which had been a day school, began to take boarders, his attic was needed and he was sent to live out and keep himself, and his salary became a grudged one hundred and fifty. Later still, during the Second War, when prices soared crazily, it was raised again — for the last time — to two hundred.

  It never occurred to him to protest. Not that he was a fool: he knew he was being exploited. But… he was attached to old Liggett. Brought up in the iciest charity, he had in him an untapped well of tenderness, and few chances to use it. Unnoticed by Liggett, almost unknown even to himself, a nerve of his being had twisted itself round that hard stick of a man. There was another reason — the memory, buried, of his humiliating failure. He could not face the thought of a new effort or a change. On the whole he was content. Why not? He had a roof of sorts, food of the poorest sort, and every hour of every night for reading. He read — apart from mathematical treatises and philosophy — poetry, books of travel, memoirs, history, and the Bible. And became widely and curiously learned.

  Old Liggett died in 1925, and his son hurriedly transformed the school into the only form in which it and its almost innocent snobbery could survive — as a preparatory school for the very young. In the simple days when a skinny white-faced Gate rang at its door for the first time, shaking with his fears, it had kept its boys until, at sixteen or seventeen, their education was held to be complete. A few, perhaps one every two years, uncommonly ambitious, or with uncommon parents, went on to a university. On these few exotic young creatures Gate used all his genius — it was nothing less — as a teacher.

  One of them became famous.

  On the afternoon of the ceremony he came into the room where it was to take place, wearing the clothes he had, it seemed, always worn, faded, shapeless, repellently stained and creased, a small old-womanish old man, thin, in no way attractive, with abrupt ungracious manners and the sharp eyes of a bird. To tell the truth he looked, and no doubt was, rather grubby and squalid.

  At the farther end of the room a small circle of men faced him, sitting or standing round the headmaster sprawled in his leather chair: three senior members of the staff and the five ex-pupils. For a moment, as always when he approached people he knew well but not well enough, he saw them as enemies. They could not possibly have guessed it from his face. The moment past, he knew how to behave himself. He knew them, too, as they did not know themselves — best of all he knew the five he had taught. They were all well-to-do men. A fat-jowled solicitor, the veins of his hands and neck dark with the blood sucked from clients too ignorant or too trusting to protect themselves against his perfectly legal rascality. A builder whom everyone in Danesacre knew to be a good careful builder just as everyone knew that he used his seat on the Town Council to share out contracts between himself and his friends. A shipowner knighted for his services to the Conservative party, whose two children had preferred poverty to his brutal treatment of them. An admirable doctor who was a drunkard. And — the only gently-bred man of the lot — old James Forbes. Between them enough greed, envy, gluttony, self-love, treachery, to blow up the world, and also warmth and geniality and a blind stoicism: and in one corner or other of their minds, half-suffocated, a well-meaning child. The child in old Forbes’s lean stooped body had been allowed quite a lot of room to breathe. He was almost exactly Gate’s own age. Looking at him, Gate saw clearly the sixteen-year-old boy with his over-polite gestures and wavering smile. He had no need to work, and his life had slid past in happy celibacy with a male cousin as polite, delicately-boned, idly cultivated, as himself — a manner of life round which Danes-acre tongues licked slyly and dubiously. In those days no one talked or even thought openly about inversion. And in fact, thought Gate, it may always have been as innocent and touching a relationship as it was now: the cousin had become a helpless invalid on a sofa, waited on by Forbes with a fluttering caress of long dry fingers: they were two withered brown leaves blowing side by side into the dark.

  He had no fear of Forbes. In the others, and in spite of knowing them and seeing through them, he feared the malice, the shrewd half-sneering half-envious spite of the north, some quality these men had in their blood. I daresay I have it myself, he thought, but I have timidity or a sort of cowardice, too, as a man whose mother rejected him almost as soon as he was born might well have…. When he was much younger he had a dream — he dreamed it several times — in which he met his forgetful mother, and knew her at once. The dream started in him the most exquisite and disturbing happiness.

  They had placed a chair for him, facing Edgar Liggett across his desk. Still sprawled — the fellow had fewer manners than he was born with — Liggett made an embarrassed and embarrassing speech. Gate shut his ears. The only sentence he heard distinctly was the one on which Liggett blared himself to an end.

  ‘… and when we’re reckoning up the many fine prosperous chaps our friend here has taught in his time, we mustn’t forget one — he may have forgotten us — but I doubt that, y’know — who has been doing damned well for himself in the world. There was a fellow up here last week from London, come two hundred and fifty miles only to look at Gregory Mott’s old school for some book or other he was going to write. I suppose you’d say that was fame
, eh, gentlemen? I don’t mind telling you, as I told the chap himself, that we’ve turned out a great many other bright lads from this school. I know that our friend Gate has a soft spot for Master Gregory, and maybe wishes he was here today…. You’ll have to make do with us, my dear fellow. And now, if you don’t mind, I have to hand you this.’

  This was a strong leather note-case, deftly flipped open by the headmaster’s finger as he passed it over, so that Gate could not miss the sight of banknotes tucked inside.

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Liggett,’ he said. He looked round their faces, all, except Forbes’s, alive with kindness and self-satisfaction. ‘Thank you.’ He was moved. He was also ashamed that he had been given money. He ought, he knew, to say something more, but the phrase that came off his tongue was, even in his ears, ungracious. ‘I’ve worked hard, and I’ve never asked a favour — and I would just as soon have left quietly. But… thanks.’

  Old Forbes said gently, ‘You’re doing us a kindness.’

  Gate looked at him. He means it, he thought. He felt a warm affection for the other man. The rest of them closed in and shook hands, smiling. Putting me at my ease, he thought.

  ‘How long have you been here, Gate? Over fifty years?’

  ‘Fifty-four.’

  ‘What in heaven’s name are you going to do with yourself now? You’ve never done anything in your life, have you?’

  The impudence was so instinctive, so natural, that Gate did not mind it. He thought of saying: No, I have never advised an old woman to sell her only valuable shares and bought them myself, I’ve never learned to butter palms, I’ve no practice in log-rolling, or commonsense, or making myself agreeable. ‘I daresay I shall amuse myself.’

  ‘You must have a meal with us.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The invitation was unlikely to be made precise. If it were he would know how to find an excuse.

  ‘Tell me, what d’you make of Gregory Mott? Is he all that?’

  ‘He’s a good writer. A great writer.’

  ‘Oh, come now, Gate. Gregory Mott? Aren’t you overdoing it? Hedge a bit. Why, he comes from here!’

  ‘That may seem to you a good enough reason to despise him,’ Gate said. ‘But the fact remains.’

  ‘You surprise me.’

  You don’t surprise me, Gate thought. ‘He even makes money. Quite apart from his writing — he holds a very important post.’

  ‘Does he indeed? Well — I don’t suppose you hear much from him these days.’

  ‘He writes regularly. Four or five times a year. At least.’

  A jeering sceptical glance from three pairs of eyes. ‘Really? Does he? Well, to be sure.’

  ‘This has been very kind of you,’ Gate said. ‘A kindness I didn’t expect. If you’ll forgive me, I must go now. Thank you.’

  They watched him walk out of the room, a quick shuffling step, bent forward.

  ‘Spry enough, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll break up fast now, I daresay.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. The old chap is as tough as a leather boot-lace.’

  ‘What d’you suppose he’ll do with the money we’ve just given him?’

  The solicitor’s purple dewlaps shook. ‘Tell me what he ever did do with his money!’

  ‘I imagine,’ old Forbes said, in a voice too low for Liggett to overhear, ’that he never had very much.’

  ‘He must have earned enough to buy himself a new suit o’ clothes once in twenty years. The one he wears stinks. Phoo!’

  ‘My wife always insists he’s an old miser.’

  ‘No,’ said Forbes.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. All I know — you know it well enough, too — he’s no fool. He may be simple—’

  ‘He is simple.’

  ‘— but he’s shrewd, you don’t take him in easily. Though as for what he gave us about Gregory Mott, I don’t believe it for a moment. Mott a great man! Bunkum!’

  The school’s only playground was a wide gravelled yard between its heavy stone front and the street, enclosed by spiked iron railings, and with one immense elm known to generations of boys as the Tree. He crossed this yard without a regret, leaving behind him a lifetime of patient effort, small, infinitely small joys, disappointments, mortifications, hopes. His life, but not the meaning of his life.

  Can one break off the past, he thought, cleanly, like tearing off the used part of a sheet of paper, without shock? A walk he had taken morning and night for years, in sunlight, in cold, in the sea mists, in rain, recovered abruptly the strangeness and sharp outlines of the first day, as though a rag had been passed over its colours; the water of the inner harbour had the mysterious grey of an old glass shadowed by the reflections stored in it, the wharf moved under his feet like the deck of a boat, gulls, perched motionless on old mooring-posts, gleamed in the light of absent suns. From the middle of the bridge separating inner and outer harbours, he stared east between the piers to the sea, darkening where it approached the horizon, and west up the estuary narrowing, out of sight, into a stream running between sharp-set hills. No port so old and small as Danesacre — already old when the Danes ran their murderous black ships on to the sand and burned the monastery on the cliff-edge — can be entirely spoiled. Though the generation of his ex-pupils had done its dull best, tearing down old houses on the pier to replace them with chain-stores and fun fairs, fouling the lanes and naked cliff-top with hutches for human rabbits, an air from the sea can do a great deal to efface progress. Nothing, God be praised, makes any lasting mark on great stretches of water and a marine sky. A nerve joining Danesacre to far-off foreign harbours carried something — call it excitement, the fever of voyages, call it the drifting thoughts of sea-captains, call it the voices of drowned sailors — blessedly hostile to all his dear pupils could do to make the place safe for greed and chicanery.

  He lived in the ancient part of the town, in one of the dilapidated houses, centuries old, built crazily across the face of the cliff, between harbour and ruined abbey. One by one they were being torn out, like rotten teeth, and dear knows that no health authority could do otherwise. Yet for centuries the toughest human beings conceivable had been born and had lived in these places. His colleagues, and other respectable persons, no doubt, were sincerely shocked when he went to live there, but where else could he have lived as cheaply as in one room of a strong three-roomed stone hovel reached from harbour level by stumbling along an all but pitch-black alley and climbing five long flights of steps to the top of the cliff? His room was small, the floor bare and uneven, there was no running water in the house, which belonged to a fish-wife, the sanitation was an evil joke, but from the narrow window he looked down a couple of hundred feet to the harbour, and north along the flying curve of the coast. Coast of his harsh infancy. For some reason, when he looked at it, he thought of his unknown mother. There was a certain rounded line like that between the base of a woman’s throat and her shoulder. Old fool, he scolded himself when this happened.

  He looked after himself. Dusted, swept, cooked, when he troubled to cook, on the old harridan’s stove. He preferred it that way. It would infuriate him to have anyone lay a hand on the books piled against all four walls and heaped on the chairs. Where the devil, if he had had any possessions except books, could he have kept them?

  He had in fact a new possession. The photograph that Gregory had sent him a week ago. He kept it, for safety, in a drawer. He took it out now and carried it to the window, to examine again every feature of the face. Gregory Mott at fifty. So far as he could see, the photograph had not been retouched, there were several fine lines, between the eyebrows, at the ends of eyes and mouth, but nothing was easier than totrace in it the face, nobly and purely beautiful, of the boy of ten. Then, as it did now, the head had seemed a little too large for his body, not in any way grotesquely so, but noticeably. Less noticeable than his air of intelligence and candour, at once innocent and lively.

  He was the son and only child of a sea-captain, to whom he had been b
orn late, when his father was fifty-nine and his mother turned forty. She died of his birth. Two years earlier his father had been badly hurt in an accident to his ship, and his firm, a prosperous Newcastle firm, had retired him on a small pension. Rejecting all female offers of help, he reared the child himself, at first as he might have reared a puppy, later with all the deftness of a woman: he washed, mended, darned — he darned beautifully — cooked, and nursed Gregory through his illnesses, including diphtheria. Because he wanted the best for his son, he sent him to Liggett’s. It could not have been easy for him to pay the fees — though he had some savings — but he managed it.

  The boy was unusually intelligent. Gate knew that at once, even before he discovered that he was acutely sensitive to beauty in words. He discovered it the day when, to fill in ten minutes at the end of a lesson, he amused himself by reading Lycidas aloud to a bored class. Glancing up, he saw Gregory, his childish face lifted, tears streaming over it, blindly listening, deaf to the snickers of his neighbours. An incident of that sort, taken together with his looks, might have made his early school life a hell. Curiously, it did not. Maybe another of his qualities saved him. He was extremely brave. The day after the Lycidas affair, he allowed four other small boys to tie a rope round him and let him down the sheer rock face of the east cliff to take a gull’s egg. When Gate heard about it, his heart stopped.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked.

  Gregory looked at him with a hild’s clear unreadable face. ’They asked me if I would.’

  ‘Do you do everything you’re asked to do?’

  He smiled. ‘No.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wanted to see if I could.’

  A magnificent gift for a solitary ill-paid unattractive thirty-year-old failure of an usher. At that time Gate had nothing human to love. His one or two ill-judged sexual flurries, with the kind of young woman willing to have to do with him, had ended where they began, in bored distaste. Gregory became the meaning of his life, his faith, his everything but God. (Until He sent me this child I had no one except Him, he thought.) That he was able to help Gregory — as a child, and later on when he needed help quite desperately—justified his life. In his eyes it had no other justification, no meaning apart from this one boy. Written down in terms of money, what he did would not seem much. Yet — it was crucial. When Gregory was seventeen he won a county scholarship to take him to a university. It covered his fees — nothing more — at a provincial university. Oxford was out of the question. Even Sheffield, where he went, might have been impossible, since his father could give him money only for his barest need in food, books, a room. At that time Gate had just been turned out of his attic in Liggett’s, and given the salary that was to keep him outside. From his hundred and fifty pounds a year he allowed Gregory fifty. If any of his colleagues, if any soul in Danesacre had known what he was doing he would have been exposed as a lunatic or insanely generous. Either epithet would have been misplaced. It was a gesture as natural as that of a starving man cramming bread into his mouth, as instinctive. Gate was starving, with a hunger less endurable than a pinched stomach. True, he had to live worse than ever. There were months when he ate nothing between Saturday morning and Monday noon. His one suit was a grotesque disgrace. And he was exquisitely and continuously happy.