I was in the sickroom under her care and tutelage for fifteen days, fifteen flowering days. Not for ten years, until I made my wretched marriage, was I again to enjoy the company of a woman so exclusively and so continuously. In that time, without intending to, Virginia set her frail stamp upon me.
In that time the world stopped – though, in the last week, I had my school books and did some studying during the day. My friends came to see me and uttered rude and envious comments, at which I laughed and made coarse jokes back: made them against Virginia, lacerating myself as I did so, in order that these uncouth sods, my chums, should not guess what was really happening.
One of them, a heavy-faced boy called Spaldine who came from Spalding and was also in the art club, was particularly pressing. I knew he fancied Virginia himself.
‘You must at least have had a bit on a finger from her,’ he said.
‘For Christ’s sake, you know I’d like to just as much as you would, Spaldine, you bastard, but if anyone touched her she’d go straight to the Head, and I’d be sacked before I knew it.’
‘Go on, it would be worth it!’ Spaldine said.
And they would leave, and my mysterious lover, twice my age, would come with her rapid walk into the room seeming to behave for a moment as if our relationship was merely a formal one – as if she were perhaps as surprised by everything as I.
In the afternoons I was allowed to go up to her room, normally out of bounds, and sit on the sofa with her and even smoke a secret cigarette with her. We talked as equals. She liked to affect a drawl and speak very cynically, telling me amusing and sometimes risqué stories of her family, all of whom did interesting things. About herself she was more reticent.
The novelty and enchantment of all this filled every last corner of my life. I thought of her every moment I was awake, whether she was present or not; and she permeated my sleep, even when I did not dream of her.
Virginia’s only drawback was that she was not as lecherous as I. Except for one occasion, she would not make love with me in the daytime. Evenings and nights, she said, were made for loving: bodies, becoming part of the darkness, were more sensuous then. I laughed and asked if her old Zulu had taught her that, but she said it was true. Perhaps it is.
Coupled with this belief of hers went a strong aversion to letting me see any part of her body unclothed. Her body, she said, was her secret; no one had ever seen it since she was grown up. Only after dark could I feel it and kiss it, and then in carefully circumscribed areas. She liked having her breasts kissed, but that was about the limit.
There was nothing wrong with her body; I could feel no scars. Recalling my secret knowledge that she had in some way been badly hurt, I asked her what unpleasant things had happened in her life.
‘Nothing unpleasant ever happens to good girls, Horatio, darling.’
Later, however, she admitted that when her family had been living in Hong Kong, when she was a small girl and her father was stationed there, she had caught rheumatic fever, and only the extreme devotion of her mother’s nursing had saved her.
Every night at midnight she came down to my bed in the sickroom. I argued that we would be safer from discovery in her room, for the duty master occasionally took it into his head to wander through the whole school; in addition, I wanted to savour for the first time the glamour of a female bed; but Virginia said that in the sickroom she could hear anyone coming in time to pretend she was simply on duty, whereas if we were up in her room, and my bed was found unoccupied, there would be a great row! So we lay together in love every time where we had first lain, and the thought that we could be caught perhaps added flavour to our happiness – for in some respects we were neither of us entirely unlike children playing a role.
Eventually, that role could be played on that stage no longer. My form master came to see Sister and asked pressingly that I be returned to school as soon as possible. I had to go. By this time I was perfectly fit, and Virginia was sending me out for long walks every day.
She had to sign me off, and I had to return to the school that had been waiting, sunlit, noisy, dusty, in the wings all this halcyon time. But she insisted that I was excused sport for another week and should continue to take my walks during that period.
Twice during those walks she met me at a prearranged spot. On one occasion she and I walked to Youlgreave and had hot toasted tea-cake and big cups of tea in a little whitewashed cottage that was still there, standing empty, during the war. I passed it on one drab occasion and recalled our bygone delight with a pang; for me it was a time of happiness at once placid and shot through with revelations. Despite her sophisticated background, Virginia seemed perfectly content with me, while every remark she let drop about the wider world she knew fascinated me.
It could not last. Once I was back in school, old embargoes snapped back into force. They were too strong to overcome. Both sickroom and her room were now out of bounds to me. I had no pretexts for meeting her, or she me. We could occasionally look at each other, but that shy evasive smile held no special message for me. Ah, my lost Virginia!
I cannot say love died. Indeed, it is not dead now. But I had to live as if it were dead. I had to work and play and laugh and swear. Brown jumped eagerly back into my bed again and we pulled each other off with almost the old abandon. Harper Junior, who had been growing obstreperous lately with the onset of puberty, was made to suck himself off by torchlight, in full disgraceful view of everyone. School life is school life. Reprieves are only reprieves.
The ordeal of School Cert came and was survived. Even at the time it seemed a dim and academic exercise. As young men, we were fully aware of the torches burning in Europe, and the bayonets glinting and the crunch-crunch of marching feet. We envied and hated the Hitler Youth, with its general immorality (according to the propaganda) and the willingness of the German maidens to bring forth children. We were glad that – as yet – there was no war, but we hated the peace.
Men aged twenty were already being conscripted into the forces; Britain was painfully waking. An old boy, a colonel, came down and talked to the school angrily about war. A recruiting poster appeared on the notice board. Hitler and Mussolini made their Pact of Steel. We swam in the green swimming-pool, and wanked and exercised and waited for the invisible flags that signal to young men.
As Hitler’s Panzer divisions swept into Poland, my stern old grandfather was felled by a stroke. Nelson, my father, and I were sitting about uselessly in Grandfather’s silent house when Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was now at war with Germany. A few moments later our old family doctor pronounced Grandfather dead.
‘Just as well the old man never lived to hear the worst,’ Father said. He thought that war would ‘ruin everything’; and that was his dead father’s view also. Nelson and I looked speculatively at each other. I was two days past my seventeenth birthday. He, three years older, wore an incongruous army uniform. He had been called up two months before; this was his first forty-eight-hour leave. He and I had never seemed further apart; but he evidently understood what I was thinking, for he said, ‘You can’t join up yet!’
‘You’ll have to go back to school, Horatio,’ Father said. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe at Branwells. The Germans will not be able to bomb us here.’
But I never went back to school again. Partly this was due to my parents; both were obsessed with how we could all be ‘safe’; Father began building an enormous air-raid shelter in the garden, conscripting me to help with the digging and concrete-mixing. It seemed to me an extremely futile operation.
My chief reason for wishing never to see Branwells again, however, was entirely because of Virginia.
We met a few days after war was declared, when the country was quivering with an indecisive excitement. That excitement also ran through Virginia’s slender frame. She had handed in her notice at Branwells and was going to join a nursing service! She hoped to go to France – she had old family friends in Paris.
This was – I must use the melodramatic old cliché which rang through my