Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ of minute shades of meaning and silences and changes of atmosphere that even the dullest child is aware of, he had reached a fair understanding of the case quite early in his life.

      His father, Llewellyn Temple, was an unfortunate man who had succeeded in his early, inexplicable ambition to become a parson: he was of shop-keeping Liverpool-Welsh background, and without the help of any connection, liberal education or apparent vocation he had come to be ordained; and as a curate he had appeared at Colpoys rectory just at the time when Laura, Richard’s mother, was in that unsettled, discontented state of agitation in which she would have married a mandrill if he had asked her – her sister Alice, seven years younger, had had her wedding that Easter; the lonely countryside was bare of suitable unmarried men; she was a pretty, high-spirited, highly-sexed woman who would be thirty in November.

      The marriage and the interest of his father-in-law had procured Mr Temple the living of Plimpton, and to the day of his death (which happened not long after, when Richard was thirteen) he thought highly of himself for this advancement. But it did not bring him much happiness: even if he had been capable of much, Plimpton would not have brought it, for the place was quite unsuitable for him, and he was quite unsuitable for the place. It was in the deep country, the profoundly conservative and Tory country (Mr Temple was a Liberal and a passionate admirer of Lloyd George): the living was poor; the parishioners were used to a parson with private means and they detested anything new-fangled, such as democracy or enthusiasm. The rectory was isolated – no neighbours except the Hall – and more than usually inconvenient; it had no running water, no electricity, no gas.

      Poor man, he was unhappy, and his unhappiness engendered more all round him: he certainly made his wife very unhappy, and she, heaping all her resentment of his coarseness, insensitivity, sexual inadequacy and increasing bad temper upon his Welsh background, made a very unpleasant symbol indeed of the poor Principality.

      Richard caught the sense of this, of course – how could he escape it? – but it was not until he was coming along towards adolescence that he began to set it against a wider field of experience, the world outside the house, and to apply it to himself personally. It was a time of elections, and Lloyd George was touring the country: in the opinion of the Hall and of almost everybody else in the vicinity Lloyd George was a hateful person, untrustworthy and unscrupulous, envious, mean and glib; he was a dirty little Welshman, a vulgar, jumped-up attorney overflowing with jealousy and spite, bent on England’s ruin. A common little man: the final damnation. He was Welsh and he was common. Yet Richard’s father was a Welshman: and Richard was his father’s son. Was there some unavoidable taint in this? Or did he perhaps belong to his mother’s side?

      He had always assumed that in the nature of things he was one of the better sort – he would have flung a handful of gold to the respectful peasantry before galloping on to the aid of the king. It was an assumption that he hardly questioned openly, for he was feeling little more than a hint of the immense force of English social pressures and he had only a vague suspicion about how they were to impinge upon him, only the most cloudy doubts about where he fitted in. He scarcely questioned the assumption; but now he would be glad to be confirmed in it, for underlying all this there was the remotely glimpsed possibility that he might be found to belong to the other side, that his mother might learn of this and cast him off.

      And then what constituted a gentleman? He had always thought he knew – perfectly obvious – but as he grew older and more concerned he found that the manifold definitions that he had somehow acquired were often contradictory. He was a candid little boy, with remarkably little social sense, and he did not know how to distinguish the cant and the half-cant from the facts. Gentlemen were both good and bad, it seemed, pure and rakish; they were always polite and well-bred, yet look at old Mr Holden of the Hall, to say nothing of Henry VIII. Gentility had nothing to do with wealth, they said: but did it not? Amos came to do the heavy digging on odd days, and when he was preparing the big square bed he came across one strangely shaped seed-potato among the King Edwards that he was setting. ‘That’s an ash-leaf,’ he said, showing it to Richard. ‘It won’t give you but four or five to one. A real gentleman’s potato,’ he added, in a respectful tone.

      Somewhere in the present world there was a shuddering noise, a crepitation: could it have been gunfire, or a bomb? But it was not repeated and it only made the slightest check in his meditation, scarcely enough to change the current of his thoughts.

      In a few moments his faint questioning had died away; he was back again, and he was remembering school – school, and how he had asked Gay about these things. In this case his visual image was so luminous and strong that if there had been a calendar on the wall of the room he saw he would have read the date: but in fact he could place this time exactly in time, because it was the term before the scholarship fiasco, and the very first day of that term, to be precise.

      The first day of term, and yet the place had just the same atmosphere as if the school had never been closed – the ammoniac smell of little boys, the taste and feeling of chalk and dust, the combined odours of deal, ink, school-books and coke. It was a comforting atmosphere, for although the last day of the holidays had been sad, conventionally sad, it had been a holiday particularly full of domestic unpleasantness and punishment, and the old unchanging world of school had been very welcome to him, especially now that he was one of the big boys, in the headmaster’s form and beyond the reach of any tyranny. Yet he had not been in the place more than a few hours before change and impermanence showed themselves and dispelled the warmth. The headmaster sent for him and said, ‘Well, Richard, and how did you leave your father and mother?’

      ‘Very well, thank you, sir,’ said Richard, and the old gentleman gazed at him for some minutes. Mr Fielding was an old friend of his mother’s father; he was indeed one of Mrs Temple’s very few relatives, though exceedingly remote, and he had known her all his life. He was educating Richard for nothing (not that Richard knew this) and when he was speaking in a private, unofficial capacity he called him by his Christian name; Richard was therefore surprised and aggrieved when the headmaster went on, ‘You know, my dear boy, your mother is very worried about your chances of a scholarship. I told her that I had got stupider boys through; but I was obliged to add that your chances were by no means as good as we could wish.’

      These words provided him with three very disagreeable reflections at once: the first brought into his unwilling mind the fact that the comfortable everlasting world of school would have an end – that it might go on, but not with him, who must leave quite soon; the second, that his progress to a public school (which he preferred to leave in the vagueness of a remote future) was neither automatic nor certain; and the third, the least important, that he would be compelled to work much harder.

      ‘Why are you looking so mumchance?’ asked Gay.

      ‘You must realise that Latin, not drawing or French, is the key to a scholarship,’ said Richard, in an imitation of Mr Fielding’s voice, as he plucked his books from the desk in the quietest corner at the back where they had elected to sit together. ‘I am to go up in front,’ he said, with much resentment, ‘and am to stay in on Wednesdays to do Common Entrance papers. It’s all’ – (lowering his voice a little, for he was speaking of a great man) – ‘ballocks.’

      Of course it was all ballocks, he asserted: anyone could get a sons-of-clergy closed scholarship. Gill had got one, and Gill notoriously wetted his bed – Gill had warts. Besides, everybody went to a public school: it was part of the process and nothing else was thinkable. Most would try for scholarships: Gay was going in for a Winchester scholarship; but he would go there, whether he got it or not. Only cads went to common schools – indeed, they were called cads’ schools.

      It was absurd to think of Gay failing, or Gay’s friends, for that matter: Gay was one of those naturally fortunate creatures who never fail. He had bright blue eyes in a round and jolly face, and he did not give a damn for anything. He could have been one of the chief bloods of the school if he had chosen, СКАЧАТЬ