77
by Robert Page
Copyright 2011 Robert Page
Smashwords Edition
To my wife, Joan Kurn, and
the woman called Kate
Part One: Kate
Chapter 1
Wednesday 12 to Tuesday 18 December 1951
"I rather think I'm very much in your debt, but would you mind taking your hand from between my legs? People might get the wrong idea."
The woman put her question to the youth with a composure quite remarkable in the circumstances of their meeting. They lay entangled in close embrace in the middle of Albert Street, a bustling highway in the heart of Nottingham.
About six inches separated the now stationary front offside tyre of a number 43 bus from the youth's right ankle. As many feet separated her body from a hastily halted Ford Popular headed in the opposite direction. Unnoticed by either a growing column of vehicles gathered behind bus and car.
"Oh! Sorry." The youth eased himself away from the woman he caressed with such accidental intimacy and scrambled quickly to his feet. He bent forward and offered her his hands. She took them and allowed herself to be helped to her feet, revealing to her helper the briefest of brief glimpses of the red panties against which his hand had rested, matching suspenders, the tops of her stockings, and, most exciting of all to his adolescent eyes, the softly suggestive lines of naked thigh curving between her panties and stockings.
"My hands. May I have them back? I need them." The woman's eyes sparkled with a mischief that understood perfectly the crimson confusion colouring the youth's face, but her composure never faltered. For the first time she registered the fact that he wore the dark brown braided jacket and grey flannel trousers of a High Fields Grammar School sixth former.
"Oh! Sorry," he repeated. "Not thinkin'."
He had not thought to release the woman's hands, that much was true, but he was thinking, albeit in a chaotic kind of way. He was thinking about the panties he had touched, then seen, and about the incredible mystery they hid from his eyes if not from his all too brief touch. And how could images of stocking tops, suspenders, and thighs -- her thighs -- not crowd his mind? Was this woman not perfection, fantasy incarnate? Then there were the hands he held -- so small, so soft, so white; so exquisitely, wonderfully, feminine -- they could not easily be dismissed. When she spoke -- Oh Lord! -- when she spoke it was with the voice of an angel, the gentle huskiness of its beautifully modulated tones bewitching beyond anything in his experience.
Again: "My hands?"
He released them. Reluctantly.
A policeman forced his way through the widening circle of spectators and joined the couple, notebook in hand.
"You all right madam?" he asked.
"Quite all right thank you. My pride's bent, but no bones broken," said the woman with a wry smile.
"And you, young man? That was a very brave thing you did."
The young man pulled a face, nodded, and mumbled, "Ye', I'm okay." His head ached abominably from violent contact with the road, but he wanted out as quickly as possible. Too many eyes were on him, and he did not like being looked at. He picked up the book he had bought only minutes before. It was ruined.
"We'd best get off the road madam, if you don't mind. And you, young man," said the policeman. He ushered the woman and the youth to the safety of the pavement. The bus driver and the driver of the Ford Popular moved their vehicles to the side of the road and followed. Albert Street resumed its bustle.
(ii)
He looked to be descended from a long line of romantic heroes. Tall, dark, and ridiculously handsome, a broad shouldered masculinity which might otherwise have been uncomfortably aggressive was tempered by the deep brown intelligent eyes of a dreamer. His dress complemented his physique: it would have been immaculate before he dived into the road to knock her out of the way of the bus. Kate Harper-Jones liked well presented and good-looking men. Her saviour was both. But neither his appearance nor his heroic action went even part way to explaining his extraordinary effect on her. That was for sure. Of the many men she had known not one had at first acquaintance raised in her the instant desire she felt for this one: this despite him being only about half her age, gauche in the extreme, so self-conscious it was almost a disability, and a Nottingham accent thick enough to cut with a knife. Suave, urbane and sophisticated he was not; nothing at all like Donald ... The bastard!
She looked across the table. Their eyes met and, to her surprise, the youth did not look away. He held her gaze. In that brief exchange, which she was never to forget, Kate Harper-Jones experienced the most remarkable sense of union. It was remarkable in that she was conscious of it less as a union with the man with whom she actually shared a table than with his potential. Gauche and self-conscious he yet was, but she would have laid money on him being clever; very, very clever. He had depth too. Of that she was equally sure. It was this, his strange depth, which so fascinated and attracted Kate. For a second, two seconds, maybe five or ten, it mattered not how many, it was as though she were one with him. She marvelled. Then she felt fear. For she knew the longing she felt for this strange young man and the spell his singular presence cast over her, were as ridiculous as they were dangerous. But they were real; very real; insanely real. Was he not young enough to be her son?
His hand against her panties, the especial pressure of one finger, the movement of that finger -- and he had moved it -- the memories chased each other through her mind, distracting and exciting.
What the hell of a state to be in. Was her life really in such a mess that an immature youth should become the most desirable male in the world? Would she yet again have to satisfy herself as best she could in the painful loneliness of her bed?
Kate Harper-Jones stifled a groan, wished vaguely that it was an age more sexually enlightened than 1951, picked up her cup and smiled encouragingly at the youth. They sat in the basement restaurant at Marks and Spencer's. "Do help yourself to a cake David. That is the name you gave to the policeman isn't it? It's not much of reward for risking your life to save mine, but it's the best I can do right now."
"Thanks. I'll 'ave a cream 'orn." He picked up the pastry and put it on his plate. "Did I 'ear you say your name's 'Arper-Jones?" Incredulity underlined his every word.
"That's right: Kate Harper-Jones."
"Then I bet you're 'Arpy's mam."
"Harpy?"
"Sorry. Should've said Michael."
"Yes. I am."
"Well, I'll go to bottom of our stairs. Fancy yo' bein' 'Arpy's mam."
David lapsed into a long and clearly bewildered silence. His difficulty was that he could not bring himself to believe that so beautiful and glamorous a woman was a mother. In his experience mothers were neither beautiful nor glamorous. They wore aprons and stood for hours at sink and stove; they cooked and cleaned, washed and ironed, worried and nagged. What they did not do was to look as though they belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. Nor were they women to be dreamed about, and about this mother he had dreamed many tortured times, for by sight he knew her well. He had seen her often on the streets near his home and behind the counter of the chemist's shop on Bridport Road, as remote and untouchable as the moon. But never had he dreamed that this woman, the focus of his every fantasy, might be Harpy's mother, or that he would touch her, actually touch her, where in the heat of his imagination he had ventured so many, many times. Tonight, every night from now on, a part of his dreaming would be remembrance.
David's silence seemed headed for eternity, and the expression on his face such that Kate Harper-Jones began to wonder if he was concussed or going into shock. Then she realized: "David ... David Andrews. Of course. I should have known. Michael's always talking about you." She laughed. "You seem to be my family's guardian angel."
On Michael's first day at High Fields school, three months earlier, David had gone to his assistance when he took a bad tumble in the school yard. The two had spoken many times since and become good friends despite being at the opposite ends of the school.
"Look," the mother continued after a while, "your book's ruined" -- his copy of Sherwood-Taylor's Organic Chemistry lay in three mutilated and separate parts to one side of the table -- "I must give you the money for a new one. How much will you need?"
David hesitated before, "I don't know Mrs 'Arper-Jones. 'Ardly seems right to -- "
She took his hands in hers and squeezed them. "To take my money? Nonsense. And call me Kate, please. Mrs Harper-Jones is such a mouthful."
David's cheeks reddened as Kate's hands closed around his, but he made no effort to release them. Rather, he prayed he would not have to stand before he lost his erection, if, with her fingers now stroking his hand, he ever would. Their teas were forgotten; his cream horn lay unmolested on his plate. He did not realize that in Kate's family circle hugging and touching were as natural as breathing.
"Well, I guess seventeen and a tanner'll cover it," he mumbled.
David looked ill at ease, still flushed, and very vulnerable; an appearance which stood in contradiction to him having a face that in more normal circumstances looked older by far than its years. Kate saw all of this and was again struck by his clearly unconscious sexuality. A shudder passed through her body. For a moment or two longer she watched her fingers stroking the back of his left hand as though they belonged to someone else. Then, reluctantly, but immediately, her face still not betraying a flicker of her many conflicting emotions, she let go his hand and reached for her handbag.
"I'll have to give you a pound," she smiled after she had looked in her purse. Her voice, like her face, spoke only of calm assurance. "No need to bother about the change."
"No. I can't 'ave that Mrs -- I mean, Kate. Wouldn't be right. Tell you what: I'll give it to 'Arpy and 'e can give it to you."
Lord! He was rough, but even so he had a curiously gentle other-worldly sort of presence, and a powerful sexuality about which she was now quite sure he was completely unaware. "Well, yes, you could do that -- " she regretted her words even as she spoke them -- "or you could bring it to my home one evening next week and -- "
"Can't do that," he interrupted roughly. "Me mam 'n dad'd 'ave a fit."
"I don't understand."
"It'd mean takin' a night off from me 'omework."
"So! It's not a crime is it?"
He snorted, looked down at the table and mumbled, "Only get Sat'day night off. Then I go to pictures wi' me mate Tim."
"And how long do you work each evening?" Kate asked the question softly, wondering if her hearing had let her down. She almost feared his answer. She had reason.
"Five hours. I do much the same on Sat'day and Sunday mornings."
"But ... but that's about 40 hours a week. And that's on top of being at school."
"You got it."
"My God!" Kate hesitated then, "You won't have girl friend I suppose?" David shook his head, his eyes still firmly fixed on the table. She continued, "40 hours homework a week, no girl friend. That's no way for a lad of your age to live. Queen Victoria's dead. Why when I was -- "
"Yo' try tellin' me mam 'n dad that. Wish somebody would." He looked up suddenly to stare directly at Kate. The expression in his eyes and on his face was one of pure hatred. "Coming top, passing exams: that's all they're bothered about. They don't 'ave to do it. No good saying anything. They don't want to know."
"David! I want to see you at my home next Tuesday evening. No excuses. Just come. A night off will do you the world of good." Kate could hardly believe what she heard herself say. It was madness. But thank God he'd stopped her telling him that when she was his age she was already sexually experienced. That would have put the cat among the pigeons.
"No chance Mrs 'Arper-Jones. Mam 'n dad'd go potty. Besides, we've got 'A' level mocks a couple o' weeks after Christmas and I'm behind wi' me revision. Got an 'orrible feeling I'm coming unstuck too."
"Then it'll do you good to talk. Tuesday evening, eight o'clock, 77 Taunton Road. I expect to see you ... Now I'd better get on with my shopping."
Kate stood up. David too. She offered him her cheek. He pecked at it, nervously, but his lips did not retreat. Rather, she felt them return to her face and this time, to her astonishment, they lingered. She shivered.
"And I'd best go back to Sisson's for another Sherwood-Taylor," said David, his cheeks on fire. "Just 'ope they've got one."
"Tuesday," repeated Kate firmly, stepping back, her eyes drawn involuntarily, longingly, to the erection he tried in vain to conceal. Oh God! What had possessed her?
(iii)
David's first waking thought on the Tuesday was of Kate Harper-Jones. It had been on the other five mornings since he'd met her. But, on this morning, it was a thought glittering with excitement. Before the day was out he would have talked with her for a second time, and in her own home to boot. And that was only two streets away.
Was it, though, a pleasure worth the loss of precious revision time? He was so far behind. What had gone wrong?
The morning lost its sparkle.
It turned sour when he arrived at school where, as usual, he was the first to take his place at the one enormous bench which occupied most of the floor in the Physics Lecture Room, home of the Lower Science Sixth (Biology). He always arrived early because to enter a full room was an ordeal he preferred to avoid. A minute or two later the other ten members of the Lower Science Sixth (Biology) began to drift in in ones and twos. A buzz of conversation grew steadily louder and more animated, and bursts of laughter more frequent. Of this life David was not a part. He could only listen, brood, and envy. Charlie, Frank, Bob, the lot of them, all lived lives so very different from his own.
Charlie and Frank had spent their Monday evening at the Palais; Bob had taken a girl to the pictures, where they had sat on the back row; Brian and Trev had hung about the city centre; Harry Frith had been in a pub. They had all been involved with girls in one way or another. They had all enjoyed themselves in ways about which David knew nothing.
But when, he asked himself -- he asked himself the same question every morning -- did they do their work? Because they did do it. His marks were not that much better than theirs, and he never did anything but work. Was he, he wondered, as bright as everyone supposed him to be? Maybe not. Maybe, one day, he'd be rumbled; and, maybe, that day was no further distant than the mocks. Oh God!
The several conversations and David's thoughts tapered quickly to a halt as Stan Tasker, the form's master, came into the room. He offered no greeting, but took the register without looking up from the book lying open on his desk. Then he capped his pen, returned it to his pocket, and raised his eyes. He was smiling.
"Some good news for you lads. There's a change in the arrangements for the mocks. In his wisdom the headmaster's decided, and I agree with him, that your normal work will suffer less if they're brought forward. You'll be starting them immediately after the Christmas break. Be prepared. They're going to be tough."
Whispers flew round the room.
"Quiet! Settle down now."
David bounced to his feet, livid in his fury. His fist pounded at the bench. "That is ridiculous," he exclaimed loudly.
A book fell heavily to the floor. Every head turned. Someone sniggered.
"Oh," said Tasker, looking over the top of his half-frames. "And precisely what, Andrews, is it that is so ridiculous? Mm!"
"Starting mocks right after 'olidays. Don't gi' us enough time for revision."
For a second time David's fist struck the bench.
"Sit down Andrews."
David remained on his feet, defiant, start-eyed in his fury.
"Sit down!"
David sat down.
"Thank you." The master looked round the class. "Does anyone else share Andrews' misgivings?"
No one spoke. A few heads were shaken.
"You seem to be on your own Andrews." A faint smile twisted the master's lips.
"I don't care." David's voice shook with emotion. Temper and fear drove him on. "I don't care what t'others reckon. I won't 'ave enough time."
Tasker nodded the nod of a sage. "Ah! Now I see. You won't have enough time. I hate to disillusion you Andrews, but High Fields school is not organized solely for your benefit. Or do you think it should be?"
David pressed his self-destruct button: "If that's going to be the case don't expect me to be 'ere. I ain't going to make myself look stupid for nobody."
"You could've fooled me," Charlie Bickerstaff murmured.
Mike White laughed and looked thoughtful.
(iv)
At exactly eight o'clock that same evening David, still simmering from his clash with Tasker, but undeterred by a shortened calendar, knocked on the back door at 77 Taunton Road. Harpy, wearing a dressing gown he had outgrown over a pair of faded pyjamas, let him in with a shy, "Hello," then turned and shouted at the top of his voice, "He's here."
Harpy's mother -- in David's eyes unbelievably more beautiful than when he had talked to her in the cafeteria at Marks, or seen her in the street, or behind the counter at Morrison's -- sat on an old, battered, armless easy chair to the left of the fireplace. A Sunday Observer rested on her lap, folded open at the Ximines crossword. A Chambers' dictionary lay on the floor by her side and, on this, a box of du Maurier cigarettes and an expensive looking gold lighter.
"Hello David," she smiled up at him, "I'm glad you've come. We don't get many visitors."
Kate placed her pencil carefully on the dictionary, next to her cigarettes and lighter.
"Makes a change for me Mrs 'Arper-Jones. I've been lookin' forward to coming."
For the first time in his life David heard the coarseness in his own voice. It troubled him. It troubled him so much that, there and then, he resolved to do something about it. Were he to be invited back as often as he hoped it was simply not on to bring coarseness of any kind into the company of so cultured and civilized a lady.
Kate's smile expanded in its width and warmth; her eyes sparkled with a brightness brighter than she would have chosen; her pulse quickened when David shook her hand. She was aware only of the quickening of her heartbeat and a measure of difficulty in her breathing. These disturbed her. She had hoped that if he did visit he would not again arouse in her the desire she had experienced at their first meeting.
"Do remember to call me Kate," she returned, almost evenly, "apart from being less of a mouthful it's friendlier: and a guardian angel has to be a friend. You haven't met my mother, have you? Mrs Stacey."
David turned to the older woman sitting on the opposite side of the fireplace. Slightly built, tall even in the sitting position, he saw her to have a well lived in, good-natured face, and to have about her an air of dignity and gentle refinement emphasized by an immaculately coiffured mass of white hair.
They shook hands.
"I'm very pleased to meet you David," she said softly and so, so gently.
He could not disbelieve her. She was that kind of woman. David decided that he liked her.
"And this," said Kate, to complete the introductions, glancing towards a pretty little girl sitting on the floor near her grandmother, "is Jean, Michael's sister. She's nine, looking forward to being ten very soon."
Jean, like Harpy, wore a dressing gown and pyjamas, and clutched a cup of cocoa between her hands. She looked curiously at David, then averted her face. To his great relief she said nothing. Little girls were a species alien to his experience.
Kate, Mrs Stacey, Jean, Harpy of course, but no Mr Harper-Jones. Nor, thought David hopefully, was there any evidence of a Mr Harper-Jones. There was no pipe-rack, no pipe, no slippers, no stray tie; not one purely adult male thing in the room. All this David took in as he exchanged small talk with the two women. In normal circumstances he hated small talk because, normally, he was so bad at it. But this, he quickly recognized, was not a normal circumstance. He had been made welcome.
Small talk came easily to his tongue.
As he talked David's eyes travelled the room, so very different from any in his own home. There tidiness amounted to a religion, a speck of dust to blasphemy. Here, the very reverse was true. Nothing, not a single item, had been arranged. Where a thing was, there was its place and if, as his mam insisted, cleanliness was next to godliness, Old Nick himself lodged here. Cigarette ash and tea stains covered the hearth. Dust lay thick on the linoleum in the recesses at either side of the chimney breast. And cobwebs -- cobwebs, no less -- hung in every corner of the ceiling. The furniture was old and dilapidated; no piece matched any other. Everything about this room was as far and as gloriously removed from the modern, highly polished, carefully matched items that were his mother's pride and joy as his imagination could conceive.
But, untidy though it was, and however old and ill-matched the furniture, it was a comfortable room lived in by comfortable people. David marvelled at and loved that room: it's heavy curtains; the dark, flower-patterned wallpaper; the green baize covered table; the old, old furniture; the square of threadbare carpet; the rag rug in front of the fireplace; the ornaments; the photographs; the seasonal display of Christmas cards; he loved them all. But what he marvelled at and loved the most were its books. Here books were not a necessary nuisance to be hidden from sight when not in use, but an essential part of the very fabric of the place and, en masse, the key to the minds of his hosts, clearly the most cultured and civilized people it had so far been his privilege to meet.
Books -- old and not so old, several of them new; hardbacks and the odd paperback -- stood and lay everywhere: singly, in rows, in heaps; on shelves, on the sideboard, on the table and under the table; on chairs and under chairs. Wherever there was a flat surface there were books. He picked out Thomas Mann and Flaubert; Plato and Kant; Ruskin and Wordsworth; Tolstoy and -- but they were all there. The authors he recognized, if few of the titles.
Classics of fiction, which he knew by name if not by reading, rubbed covers with tomes on history, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and criminology. Mein Kampf, in the original German, stood cheerfully sandwiched between Marx and Engels; the Koran between a Bible and the Baghavad Gita, whatever the Baghavad Gita was. It was an impressive array.
David sensed that he had moved into a different world, a world of gentility and learning; a world in which education was much, much more than job training; a cultured world in which learning was means and end, the prize of prizes.
The influence on his future life of the first minutes he spent in that living-room at 77 Taunton Road was to be profound. They presented him with an ideal greater even than the person of Kate, but from which she was never totally to be divorced, an ideal that was to stay with him when he was laid low and to remain with him when he was raised up. That ideal was the beauty of learning, and Kate -- his lovely, adorable, Kate -- was its creator Queen, her throne a battered old chair.
(v)
"Do sit down David; you make the place look untidy," said Kate.
She extended an elegant hand towards a seemingly legless but voluminously cushioned chair squatting between hers and her mother's. The three of them formed the points of an equilateral triangle.
David sat down. Kate went on, "I saw you crossing the platform at the Albert Hall last Friday -- twice."
The school speech day and prize giving had been held the previous Friday evening. David had been awarded prizes in mathematics and biology for his performance in the GCE 'O' levels.
"Always get something," he growled, blushing.
"You must be very clever."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Sorry David, I'm embarrassing you. Would you like a cup of tea? I think you've earned it."
"Please, if you can spare it."
Tea was still rationed.
"Spare it for the man who saved my life? Of course we can. By the way, I hope you don't mind David, but I must ask -- it was lucky for me that you were about at the time -- what were you doing in the city centre on a Wednesday afternoon?"
"I wasn't playing 'ooky if that's what you thinking. Games was cancelled 'cos pitches was waterlogged."
Kate pulled a face. "Then I'll take back all I said about the rain at the start of the week." She stood up and turned to Harpy and Jean. "Come on you two. Finish your cocoa and off to bed with you. I'll be up in a minute."
Kate was glad to be able to move, but she could not relax. The moment she dreaded was fast approaching. David, for his part, felt happier than he had for a long time, and completely at home. At last he had found the family to which he really belonged.
When the children were gone, and after Kate had tucked them in and returned to the living room, Mrs Stacey excused herself: "I hope you don't mind if I leave you David but I have an hour with our neighbour, Mrs Fish, most evenings. She's a poor old soul. Doesn't get out very much."
A minute or two later Kate served their tea in what, for David, was an ambience removed from reality. Only in the furthest reaches of his wildest dreams and fantasies of the few days since their first meeting, had he imagined himself alone with her. And yet, on his very first visit to her home, dream was become fact. Her undivided attention was his.
David bathed in the sublime glow of her presence, wanting for nothing. Then ... then, as she sat down and eased herself into a more comfortable position, Kate's knees parted. Her skirt slipped upwards.
She saw David's eyes dart quickly to her legs and, as quickly, away. A guilty scarlet arose in his face. Kate knew then that she needed to be more careful or run the risk of putting ideas into his head as dangerous as those running riot in her own. Heaven forbid that he should think she was leading him on!
"Now tell me something about yourself," she breathed, ignoring his confusion and the racing of her own heart. "Are you going on to university when you finish your time at High Fields?"
The huskiness in Kate's voice did nothing to restore David's composure, but he answered readily enough. "Guess so. To do medicine. It's as good as anythin' I reckon."
"As good as? What a strange answer."
"Wouldn't be if you knew me mam 'n dad. It's what they want."
"Oh! I see."
David looked keenly at Kate and almost smiled. "You know," he said, "I reckon you might."
"Do you want to talk to me about what you might want to do?"
"Wouldn't change nothin'. Anyway, I don't know. So what's use?"
"Well ... if you ever change your mind." Kate hesitated for a moment, then hurried on to safer ground: "Outside your schoolwork, what are you most interested in?"
"Right now it's your books. Never known nobody with as many as you got. Reckon you could start a library."
"You like books do you?"
"I'd like to like books. But 'bout the only books I read are textbooks."
"Pity." Kate hesitated for a moment then, "Do you know what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about books?"
"No. Know 'is name. Don't know nothing about 'im."
"He was an American essayist and philosopher who lived for most of the last century. He said, 'Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst ... They are for nothing but to inspire'."
"Can't say Grove and Newell or Sherwood-Taylor inspire me."
"What are they? Textbooks?"
"Zoology 'n Organic Chemistry."
Kate chuckled. "Facts! Facts are useful, I'll grant you that, but when you know something, what then? I prefer ideas myself. Get hold of an idea, add a dash of imagination, mix it with life, and what have you got? Inspiration. Perhaps even a reason for living; certainly a reason for living experimentally. 'Reading maketh a full man' David. Francis Bacon said that and, my word, he was right."
"Don't know Francis Bacon neither."
"Oh David." Kate reached out and laid a hand on his knee. She couldn't help herself; she was a great toucher. "Do you ever listen to music? Real music I mean, not your moon in June stuff."
"Not very often. I'd like to, mind you: if I 'ad time. Don't get no time to go to no concerts, you see ... 'cept a couple I been to with school. An' I can't listen to much on wireless either."
"Why's that?" Kate posed the question softly.
"Same thing. Time."
"Is that all?"
David shook his head.
"Do your parents not like classical music?"
"Dad says it's mournful an' a waste of time."
"Why on earth should he think it's a waste of time?"
"It'll never earn me nothing."
Kate withdrew her hand from David's knee and shook her head. The mother in her wanted to hug and comfort him; the woman to encourage him to revolt against so one-sided an approach to his education. But she knew she could do neither.
"Oh dear," she murmured, strengthened in her assessment of David as an exceptionally gifted but socially retarded, lonely, and unhappy young man. "You could come and listen to concerts on our wireless," she continued after a moment, "if you could make the time. And if you want to widen your reading I'd be happy to lend you a few books." She reached for one at the top of the heap on the far side of her chair. "I've mentioned Emerson. You could do worse than start with a bit of his stuff. Read 'The American Scholar' first. Then come and tell me what you make of it."
"Can I?" asked David eagerly. He was in.
"Can I?" repeated Kate, grimacing.
He snorted and grinned: “You're as bad as Pop Dudley. All right: may I?"
"You may David. With pleasure."
He took the volume of Emerson's essays and addresses. "Might not be easy though."
"Emerson's not too difficult."
"I wasn't thinkin' of that."
"What were you thinking of?"
David's grin returned, wide and mischievous. "Don't you mean, 'Of what were you thinkin'?'"
Kate laughed: "Touché. Of what, then, my formal young man, were you thinking?"
His amusement disappeared. The cloud returned to cover his face. "That it isn't goin' to be easy comin' round 'ere. To tell you the truth, me mam 'n dad think I'm at school now, at sixth form's Scientific Society."
Kate wondered then if David was as naive as he seemed. Why else would he admit to lying to his parents if not to let her know how much he had wanted to talk to her? And if he wanted to talk to her badly enough to lie, well ...
"I think I should be flattered," she murmured.
"Don't see why. Mr 'Arper-Jones out is he?"
"No. He doesn't live here. We've been living apart for about 18 months."
"I see. I'm sorry." David looked thoughtfully at Kate -- her insides melted -- and then, abruptly, he stood and offered her his hand. "I'd best be goin'. Been nice talkin' to you."
He turned and was gone.
Kate would in time get used to the speed of David's farewells. But now she was aware only of the quiet emptiness he left behind.
Chapter 2
Wednesday 19 December 1951 to Sunday 6 January 1952
David smouldered with resentment for several days after Tasker dropped his bombshell but then, belatedly, he realized an obvious truth: the whole of the sixth form was in the same boat as himself. If his mark suffered so would everyone else's. He should still finish at the head of the list, and that was all his parents cared about.
And so he decided to do what he could. Throughout the Christmas holiday he retired to his room to study for five hours each morning and a further five hours each evening. Christmas Day and Saturday evenings were the only exceptions to his routine. His parents saw to that.
There was no question in David's mind of putting into practice his threat to miss the mocks. The possibility had not even outlived his temper.
He put in the hours, but he was not able to put in the work, for however hard he tried to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing his mind turned to Kate.
He spent large portions of his time writing letters of devoted and undying love to her. In them he employed an eloquence he could never have mustered had he been called upon to express his feelings to her face. Never, for instance, would he have dared to ask her to instruct him in the art of sexual love and to permit her body to be the blackboard upon which his lessons were writ. But in his letters he did.
David wrote many letters. He destroyed them all.
At other times he read the anthology of Emerson's essays and addresses loaned to him by Kate, initially because it was her book, then because he began to appreciate something of why she believed the world of ideas to be more exciting than that of dry scientific facts.
"The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul," he read, conscious of the deadness of his own; and, on another occasion, "Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind."
Who could alter his? he wondered. Kate?
(ii)
At the time of their meeting Kate was aware of David as a young man she had occasionally 'seen around'. Then, as 1951 drew to its close, she began to 'see him around' remarkably often. Doubt disappeared from her mind. He had developed a crush on her: and so Kate took care not to greet him so warmly as to give as much as the suspicion of a hint of encouragement to his youthful passion. If she denied him hope, she believed, then, in time, nature would run its course and he would either disappear from her life or come to look on her as a friend, possibly a trusted confidante.
That was Kate's theory. It was a fine theory for as long and she ignored how much David disturbed her. But at night, alone in her bed, wakeful, she could not ignore him. Many were the hours of sleep he cost her; many the hours of her dreams he filled.
David's belief that he was being successful in giving away nothing of his preoccupation with Kate took a knock early in the New Year.
His mother delivered the blow when she asked, "'Ow you getting on with ya revision our lad?"
"Not as well as I'd like mam," he answered. "Don't seem to be clickin' some'ow."
He should have known better than to be so frank.
"Thought ya didn't seem ya normal self. Ya been a bit moody. Were only talking to ya dad about it last night. These walks ya've been taking round the block ain't got anythin' to do with it 'ave they? Yo' ain't got yourself a girl 'ave ya?"
David averted his face as he felt the blood rising to his cheeks. "Don't be daft mam. I go walking to clear me 'ead."
"That's all right then. Just pull ya self together me lad. Get stuck in."
"It ain't as easy as that mam. I'm -- "
"Course it is. Ya want to be a credit to me an' ya dad don't ya?"
"Yes mam." Three bags full mam. Anything you say mam. Glad ya listened. Right grateful I am. Wonder what you'll say when Charlie Bickerstaff an' Mike White beat the bloody 'ell out o' me?
It was a brief conversation. David's conversations with his parents always were brief, but this one served a purpose. It brought home to him how much of his time he had wasted in dreaming about Kate. He also came to see a private conversation with her as essential although, with the holiday nearly at an end, he was not at all sure to what point. There simply was not the time to catch up with the work he had wanted, needed, to do.
Having made up his mind to talk to Kate, at a little before nine o'clock on the very next morning, which was the Saturday before the start of the new term, David took a head clearing walk around the block.
"Feeling a bit stale," he told his mother.
She grunted doubtfully.
He walked no further than the corner of Weston Road, where he lived, and Bridport Road. There he waited. He did not have long to wait. Almost immediately he saw Kate turn out of Taunton Road and walk towards him. At a few yards distant she began to smile.
"Hello," he said, pleased with his effort. "Hello" sounded so much better than "Ayup"; and better still for being "Hello" and not "'Ello."
"Hello David, you're an early bird," replied Kate cheerfully.
She was about to walk on when, "Kate -- "
She stopped, face upturned.
"I'm thinkin' of goin' to th'Athena tonight. No 'Ighway's on."
-- Oh God! thought Kate, he's going to ask me for a date --
"Trouble is, me mate Tim's got a cold. Do you think 'Arpy, I mean Michael, might like to go with me? We can go to first 'ouse. I'd pay." David's words gushed out in the staccato of machine-gun fire.
Kate met David's eager eyes. Her expression gave away nothing. "I'm sure he'd love to."
"Should I just call for 'im?"
"Do that. I'll tell him at lunch-time. I finish at one on Saturdays."
"See you 'bout half past five then." With that David hurried away up Weston Road.
Kate went happily on her way. She was smiling. Why, she wondered, if he'd wanted an excuse to call on her again, had he not simply asked if he could return the Emerson?
David, for his part, spent the next four hours with Sherwood-Taylor in the constructive contemplation of the mysteries of the benzene ring.
(iii)
No Highway is a gentle love story. The two lovers -- a traditionally absent minded professor, Theodore Honey, and an air-hostess, Marjorie Corder -- are gentle people played, in the film, by James Stewart and Glynis Johns. The 90 minutes of screen time it takes for their story to unfold were, for David, 90 minutes of pure magic.
The huskiness in Glynis Johns' voice was the wand which cast the spell. So alike to Kate's was it that for David to listen to the one was for him to listen to the other. Inevitably, and soon, it was not Glynis Johns he watched walk the screen, but Kate; and it was he, not James Stewart, with whom she fell in love and who, in the end, owned to his love for her.
David embraced the world of Theodore Honey and Marjorie Corder with all that he had and with all that he was. It was a civilized world, gentle and warm, without harshness or cruelty of any kind to scar its paradisiacal landscape. Nevil Shute's fiction convinced him of the reality of romance. It became impossible for him any longer to think of himself as being in love with Kate: he romanced her, and that was far more exciting than love.
David made the distinction between love and romance because he trod unfamiliar ground. He understood love not as an emotion, or an exalted state of being, or a blending of hearts and minds, but as a quality measured in terms of duty and responsibility. That was how his parents expressed it.
His father, for instance, provided the money for his mother to buy the necessities of life. He ordered her life for her -- she did little without his permission -- and so he loved her. It was a logic David had never questioned.
His mother prepared his father's meals -- and on time, always on time -- washed and ironed his shirts, darned his socks and never, ever, defied his wishes. And so she loved him.
But not once had David seen his parents kiss, or embrace, or hear one say to the other, "I love you," which is what he so longed to say to Kate and to hear her say to him.
"What matters to a man," his mother had once told him, "are a full belly and a clean shirt, not all ya kissin' and sloppin'. Yo' remember that me lad. Ya can't live on kissin' an' sloppin'."
And so David's parents loved him as they loved one another. They gave him food and clothing, a bed and a room of his own, pocket money which, as they often pointed out, he did nothing to earn; they protected him from temptation, and they directed the course of his life. What did it matter that they had never actually told him that they loved him? What did it matter that they had not hugged him since he was knee-high to a gnat? They did everything for him and removed all worry from his path; there was nothing more he could possibly want ... they said.
As an indifferent supporting film moved towards its close David's mind turned again to Kate. He had romanced her in his dreams; dare he romance her in reality?
(iv)
Her mother was with Mrs Fish; Jean had been in bed for half an hour. Kate sat alone with a book open on her lap, but she was not reading. She was waiting for David to bring Michael home, apprehensive of when he would and, even more disturbingly, of the moment she would again be alone with him. To have him near her and not be able --
The outer door opened and banged shut. She heard David's voice and Michael's laugh. Then the living-room door burst open and Michael bounded in, followed more cautiously by David, who stood in the doorway, tall and solemn, watchful and silent, brooding and dangerous.
Why did she want him so? Why? Why?
"I don't need to ask if you've enjoyed yourself," Kate said to Michael, at the same time offering to David a smile of welcome. Again her composure did not fail her.
"It was great mother. All about this absent minded professor who said the tail was going to fall off an aeroplane. He'd worked it all out on paper and set up an experiment. Nobody believed him until -- "
"I think you'd better tell me about it in the morning. Get your cocoa and take it upstairs. Quickly, you're late." To David who, now, was smiling down at her, she said, "Has he behaved himself? It was very good of you to take him."
"'E's -- He's -- been as good as gold."
"I'm glad. Would you like a cup of tea for your trouble?"
David's smile widened. "It 'asn't been no trouble, but I'd love a cup of tea."
He slumped into the seat he had used on his first visit.
When Kate sat down after giving David his tea and balancing her own cup on a corner of the mantelpiece she took care this time to cover her knees with her skirt.
David sipped silently at his tea, wanting, but not daring, to speak of all that was on his mind. Kate, too, dared to say nothing. She wanted David to stay; she hoped he would finish his drink and leave.
He finished it and stayed where he was.
"Do you really not have a girl friend David?" asked Kate eventually. The silence had become intolerable.
Even as she spoke Kate regretted her choice of question.
David shook his head. Crimson flooded his face.
"And have you never had one?"
"No. Me mam 'n dad reckon girls are trouble. But, 'eck Kate, I ain't thinkin' of gettin' married or anythin' like that. I just want a bit of fun. Me dad's potty about it though. According to 'im the only good woman's me mam. The rest's tarts ... Me mam's just as bad, mind: whenever I've said anythin' to 'er she's carried on as though I'm twisted or somethin'. She says sex's filthy and it's a pity there ain't some other way for us t'ave babies. Not that they've ever told me about that, mark ya." David stopped talking and sat with his hands clasped tightly together, his face a study in brown. Then, abruptly: "Do ya mind me talkin' to ya like this Kate? ... yo' bein' a woman and all that. Do yo' think I'm twisted?"
Kate smiled sympathetically, crossed her legs, and saw David's eyes flick instantly to her knees. Damn.
"No, not at all. I'm glad you feel able to talk to me. And no, I don't think you're twisted." Aroused, and flustered because she was aroused, instead of stopping there Kate allowed curiosity and disbelief to impel her on. "There's nothing twisted about wanting to date a few girls. There's no harm in a kiss and a cuddle either. It's normal. You know, David, I can hardly believe you've never kissed a girl. You're a very attractive young man."
"Well I ain't, and that's God's honest truth. Mind, I'd love to gi' it a go. Can I -- I mean, may I -- kiss you Kate? Just once."
Kate's heart sank as she recognized too late the opportunity her runaway tongue had given to David. Worse, she was tempted. And how she was tempted. Her desire to say a disastrous yes and to find out if the touch of his lips excited her as much as the touch of his hand was near irresistible. "No!" she snapped. "You may not."
"Oh!"
More gently: "I'm sorry David. I didn't mean that the way it came out. I think I should enjoy you kissing me -- "
"Then let me kiss ya."
"No David. It -- "
"Why not? Where's the 'arm in it? An' if ya think you'd like it, well - "
Where was the harm in a single kiss? Kate ran an agitated hand through her hair, poised on the brink, tempted more than ever to say yes. "David, I'm very fond of you -- tremendously fond of you, if you must know -- and I think you're an attractive, lovable, and very clever young man. But if I let you kiss me I don't think you'd want to stop there."
David's eyes took in the slim shapely length of Kate's calves; the narrowness of her waist; the full roundness of her breasts; her almond shaped, cornflower blue eyes; her hair, so fair as to be almost blonde; and there was nothing he had ever wanted more than to press his lips to hers.
"I only want a kiss Kate. Nothin' else. Just one kiss, so's I know what it's like."
"That's why I can't let you. Can't you understand?"
"No, I can't."
"Then I think we'd better talk about something else. Or you can go."
David made no attempt to hide his disappointment. "I thought you was diff'rent. I thought I could talk to you about anythin'. Should've known better. Ya no diff'rent to me mam 'n dad. Soon as I want to talk about somethin' that's important to me ya tell me to shut up. Ya right. I'd best clear off. I'll not be back."
He was at the door when Kate called out, "David! Don't go."
He turned, fresh hope on his face and in his voice. "Can I kiss you then?"
"No David, but I don't want you to go off in a huff. I want to try to make you understand. Come on, sit down." He returned to perch uncomfortably on the edge of his seat. Kate turned in hers so that they sat with their knees very nearly touching. She laid her hands on his and continued, "I'm an experienced woman. Kissing me wouldn't be like kissing a girl of your own age. One of us, and it could be me, might want to go further. And we can't. We'd be risking all sorts of trouble. David, tell me you understand. Please."
"Ya think ya'd like me kissing ya, but ya don't trust yourself. That what you're sayin'?"
Kate chuckled, "Yes, I suppose it is. But neither do I trust you. At least, not when it comes to that."
"But ya don't think I'm evil?"
"Evil? Nonsense."
"It's what me mam'd call me."
She squeezed his hands. "No David, you're not evil. You're a normal, healthy, and very attractive young man. I'm rather flattered, actually." Kate released his hands, sat back, lit a cigarette, and squinted at him through the smoke purling about her eyes. "David, I don't want to put you through what I once went through. And it could easily happen if I let you kiss me. I was only a little older than you when I got involved with a married man. I was in my first year at Sheffield University and he was a lecturer. Guy was a lot like you in some ways. He was as old as I am now, 35 ... "
David listened, entranced, as Kate told him of her calamitous affair and how it had ended when she had been cited as correspondent in the divorce court by her lover's wife.
" ... Now I suppose you think I'm some kind of scarlet woman," she sighed 15 minutes later, lighting another cigarette. Isn't that how your parents would describe me?"
"Probably."
"And you?"
David stood up. "Don't be daft. Give me 'alf a chance and I'd marry ya."
Kate laughed, then, more seriously, "There's a lot of rubbish talked about sex you know ... by a lot of hypocrites. But things are changing, and they'll go on changing. In another 20 or 30 years -- say, by 1970 or 1980 -- it'll be anything goes. You'll see."
"Do you think so? Honest?"
"I do. If it was 1970 now I dare say we'd be able to kiss, and more, and nobody would bat an eyelid. And that's how it should be. But it's not 1970, its 1952, and there's a long way to go yet."
"You're telling me." David was silent for a while. A thoughtful frown creased his face. Then, "Can I -- May I -- come again tomorrow night?"
"Of course. You can tell me what you've made of Emerson."
"Maybe," he grunted.
And then he was gone.
(v)
Kate slept little that night, fear the culprit. She was afraid because only she knew how close she had been to allowing David to kiss her, and how warmly she would have responded. She knew, too, that she should put an end to his visits at once, while she could still say no ... except that to stop him coming and not to see him again was unthinkable. He needed her.
David shared Kate's wakefulness. At first it was a wakefulness he willed in order to be able to go over again and again every detail of their conversation. She had not laughed at him; she had denied that he was evil or perverted; she cared for him enough to give her real reason for refusing him a kiss; and she had trusted him enough to admit to having done 'it' outside of marriage, and with a married man to boot. What a woman.
But then, as he was at last drifting into sleep, David remembered that he had not talked to Kate about how much he had fallen behind in his work, which was why he'd wanted to talk with her in the first place. Fear hit him with the suddenness of a tropical storm. It clawed at his stomach, pounded at his heart, gripped his throat, and stretched to snapping his every nerve. The mocks! They were less than 36 hours away and he was nowhere near ready for them.
Without mercy, without remorse, without abatement or promise of reprieve, fear stole from David any chance of rest.
"Yo' all right me lad?" asked his father when the morning finally arrived and David crept downstairs. He looked, and felt, ill and tired.
"'Ere, yo' sit down," said his mother. "Ya look as though ya've got a bug or summat to me." She touched David's forehead with the back of her hand. "Reckon I'm right too. Yo' got a temp'rature. Yo' feel 'im Ted."
Ted Andrews laid his hand on David's forehead and grunted: "Best take it easy today our David. Forget ya books. Stay in. Keep warm. Ya'll be as right as rain tomorrow, yo' see."
Stay in ... Not see Kate. "But dad, I don't want to stay in all day. I can't."
"Yo'll do as ya told."
Chapter 3
Sunday 6 January (Contd) to Thursday 13 March 1952
As the day wore on David's limbs began to ache and his head to throb. He sweated in the one minute, shivered in the next. In turn he tried to sleep, to read and to listen to the wireless, but nothing diverted his mind from the mocks less than 24 hours distant.
In the end he stopped trying to do anything and went to bed early. Surely to God, he thought, tonight he must sleep. But sleep did not come until the night was nearly spent, and then the little he had was filled with unremembered nightmares.
When he stumbled downstairs in the morning his father -- the head storekeeper at Cook's, a firm of clothing wholesalers -- had already left for work. His authority had stayed behind.
"It's back to bed for yo' me lad," said his mother in the moment she saw him. "Ya dad said I'd got to keep ya at 'ome if ya was no better. You're a sight worse by the look on ya."
"But mam," David protested, "I can't go back to bed. I'll miss mocks."
"Never yo' mind them. Ya 'ealth comes first." Flo Andrews smiled indulgently. "'Sides, it'll give t'others a chance to make a name for 'emselves. They'll be glad on it, yo' see if they're not."
David returned to his bed. He slept all day. When he woke up his temperature was gone and his worry too: it was not his fault he'd missed the mocks.
A few minutes later his father came into his room.
"Ya lookin' a sight better lad."
"I feel it dad. 'Ad a good nap."
"Reckon ya'd best 'ave a couple o' days in bed though. Then ya can take it easy for the rest of week."
"Have you happened to see David in the last day or two?" Kate asked Michael on the morning of the Wednesday. Michael was about to start out for school.
"No," he replied, "but that'll be because of the mocks. We're not seeing much of the sixth formers at all."
"I don't suppose you are. Michael -- "
Michael stopped with his hand on the door handle. "Yes?"
"Keep an eye open for David will you? I was expecting him to come round on Sunday and he didn't. I can't help wondering if he's ill. He didn't look too good when he left on Saturday. If you do see him tell him I've been asking after him."
"Okay."
But Michael did not see David on the Wednesday, on the Thursday, or on the Friday.
Kate's anxiety grew with the passing of each day.
(ii)
At a quarter to nine on the Monday morning of the week following the mocks David strolled into the High Fields school yard and made his unhurried way to the Physics Lecture Room. As he neared its door and was able to see through the glass panels in its upper half he saw to his astonishment that, for once, he was not the first arrival but the last. Apart from his own every seat around the one enormous bench was occupied.
Although he shrank before the ordeal of entering a full room, a puzzled David nevertheless did his best to affect nonchalance.
"Mornin'," he called, to no one in particular.
The door closed behind him. The catch snicked. He took a step forward, then stopped. His greeting had been ignored; not a single head had turned. There was an atmosphere, palpable and hostile. He looked round. All ten faces were averted from him. Their owners sat huddled in two separate groups of five. The quiet conversations in progress when David entered the room continued uninterrupted.
"Mornin'," he repeated.
Again, no answer; again, no movement.
Apprehensive now, David walked the length of the bench to take his seat at its distant end. An envelope inscribed 'ANDREWS' lay on his stool. He noticed then that, while his stool stood exactly on its usual spot, those on its either side did not. They had been moved to left and right, away from his. He picked up the envelope and sat down. His hands were trembling.
Charlie Bickerstaff sat motionless to his right, his legs wrapped round those of his stool, his elbows on the bench, his chin rested in cupped hands. He looked bored.