‘You know perfectly well that’s not true.’
‘It is true. And anyway, I didn’t want him here. We could have been all right on our own.’
How could she tell him that to be on your own was not easy? She had jumped at the chance of getting out of teaching and, in any case, they were cutting down on Latin teachers nowadays. Furthermore, the pupils, even the academic ones, were becoming more difficult. She had been very lucky to have had the chance of marrying again, after the hard years with Tommy. But you couldn’t tell Ralph the truth about Tommy, he wouldn’t listen. Most people, including Ralph, had seen Tommy as cheerful, humorous, generous, only she knew what he had been really like. Only she knew, as well, the incredible jealousy that had existed between Jim and Tommy from their youth. Almost pathological, especially on Tommy’s side. It was as if they had never had any love from their professor father who had been cold and remote, hating the noise of children in the house. They had competed for what few scraps of love he had been able to throw to them now and again.
She couldn’t very well tell Ralph that the night his father had crashed his car he had been coming from another woman, on Christmas Eve. She had been told that in the wrecked car the radio was playing ‘Silent Night’.
Of course, in his own field Tommy had been quite good, at least at the beginning. He had been given a fair number of parts in the Theatre and later some minor ones on TV. But then he had started drinking as the depression gripped and the parts became smaller and less frequent. His downfall had been his golden days at school when he had been editor of the magazine, captain of the rugby team, actor. What a hero he had been in those days, how invisible Jim had been. And even now invisible in Ralph’s eyes. And he had been invisible to her as well, though she often recalled the night when Tommy had gate crashed Jim’s birthday party and had got drunk and shouted that he would stab him. But he had been very drunk that night. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he had shouted. Why had he hated Jim so much even though on the surface he himself had been the more successful of the two? At least at the beginning?
She should have married Jim in the first place; she could see that he was much kinder than Tommy, less glamorous, less loved by his father, insofar as there had been much of that. But she had been blinded by Tommy’s apparent brilliance and humour, and, to tell the truth, by his more blatant sexiness.
Of course he had never had any deep talent, his handsomeness had been a sort of compensatory glow, but when that faded everything else faded too. She herself had been too complaisant, declining to take the hard decision of leaving him, still teaching in those days, and tired always.
To Ralph, however, his father had appeared different. He had been the one who carried him about on his shoulders, taught him how to ride a motor bike, how to play snooker (had even bought a snooker table for him), taken him to the theatre to see him perform. Even now his photograph was prominent in his son’s room. She had been foolish to hide from him the true facts about his father’s death, his drunken crash when returning home from one of his one-night stands. She should have told him the truth, but she hadn’t. She had always taken the easy way out, though in fact it wasn’t in the end the easy way at all.
And then Jim had started to visit her, he now a promoted teacher, although in the days when Tommy had been alive not often seen except casually at teachers’ conferences, but very correct, stiffly lonely, and certainly not trying to come between her and his brother, though she knew that he had always liked her. She had learned in the interval that kindness was more important than glamour, for glamour meant that others demanded some of your light, that you belonged as much to the public as to your wife. Or so Tommy had used to say.
She remembered with distaste the night of the school play when she had played the virginal Ophelia to his dominating Hamlet, off-hand, negligent, hurtful, almost as if he really believed what he was saying to her. But the dazzled audience had clapped and clapped, and even the professor father had turned up to see the theatrical life and death of his son.
But how to tell Ralph all this?
That night she said to Jim in bed,
‘What are we going to do about Ralph?’
‘What now?’
‘You’ve seen his report card? He used to be a bright boy. I’m not just saying that. His marks are quite ridiculous. Can’t you give him some help in the evenings? English used to be his best subject. In primary school he was always top.’
‘I can help him if he’ll take it. But he won’t take it. His English is ludicrous.’
‘Ludicrous? What do you mean?’
‘What I said. Ludicrous.’ And then, of course, she had defended Ralph. No one was going to say to her that her son’s intellect was ludicrous which she knew it wasn’t. And so it all began again, the argument that never ended, that wasn’t the fault of anyone in particular, but only of the situation that seemed to be insoluble, for Ralph was the thorn at their side, sullen, implacable, unreachable.
‘I’m afraid he hates me and that’s it,’ said Jim. ‘To tell you the truth, I think he has been very ungrateful.’
She could see that herself, but at the same time she could see Ralph’s side of it too.
‘Ungrateful?’ she said.
‘Yes. Ungrateful. You remember the time I got so angry that I told him I had after all brought him a television set and he shouted, “You’re a bloody fool then.”’
‘You have to try and understand him,’ she said.
‘It’s always the same. He won’t make the effort to understand. His father’s the demi-god, the hero. If he only knew what a bastard he really was.’ Always making fun of him with his quick tongue, always taking girls away from him, always lying to his distant father about him, always making him appear the slow resentful one.
That night she slept fitfully. She had the feeling that something terrible was happening, that something even more terrible was about to happen. And always Ralph sat in his room playing his barbarous music very loudly. His stepfather would mark his eternal essays in his meticulous red writing, she would sew, and together they sat in the living room hearing the music till eventually he would tell her to go and ask Ralph to turn it down. She it was who was always the messenger between them, the ambassador trying hopelessly to reconcile but never succeeding. For Ralph resented her now as much as he resented Jim.
She couldn’t believe that this could go on.
Ralph sat at the back of his stepfather’s class, contemptuous, remote, miserable. Quite apart from the fact that he thought him boring, he was always being teased by the other pupils about him. His nickname was Sniffy, for he had a curious habit of sniffing now and again as if there was a bad smell in the room. But, to be fair to him, he was a good, conscientious teacher: he set homework and marked it and it really seemed as if he wanted them all to pass. But there was a curious remoteness to him, as if he loved his subject more than he loved them. Nevertheless, he was diligent and he loved literature.
‘This, of course, was the worst of crimes,’ he was saying, sitting at his desk in his chalky gown. ‘We have to remember that this was a brother who killed another one, like Cain killing Abel. Then again there is the murder in the Garden, as if it were the garden of Eden. There is so much religion in the play. Hamlet himself was religious; that, after all, was the reason he didn’t commit suicide. Now, there is a very curious question posed by the play, and it is this’ (he sniffed again),
‘What was going on between Gertrude and Claudius even while the latter’s brother Hamlet was alive? This king about whom we know so little. Here’s the relevant speech:
‘Aye that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,
won to his shameful lust
the will of a most seeming virtuous queen …’
The point was, had any of this happened in Hamlet’s lifetime? He