Eighteen, he remembered her, and not too tall, with almost masculine features below short chestnut hair: brown eyes, full cheeks and proportionate lips, like Aphrodite his inward eye had commented time and time again, only a little sweeter. She wore brown sweater and brown cardigan, a union that gave only tormenting glimpses of her upper figure, until one summer’s day when the cardigan was set aside, revealing breasts on the same classical style, hips a trifle broad, complementing nevertheless her somewhat stocky legs and fleshy redeeming calves. She had only to move from the counter to the foot of the stairs that led to the upper part of the shop, and Mr Raynor’s maxims of common arithmetic became stale phrases of instruction to be given out quickly, leaving his delighted class with an almost free session.
What memory could not accomplish, imagination did, and he recreated a tangible image, moved by long-cultivated pre-occupations of sensuality in which his wife and family took no part. He adjusted his spectacles, rolled his tongue around the dry back of his teeth, and grated his feet once more on the bar of the stool. As she walked she had carried her whole body in a sublime movement conducive to the attraction of every part of it, so that he was even aware of heels inside her shoes and finger-tips buried perhaps beneath a bolt of opulent cloth. A big trolley-bus bundled its green-fronted track along the road, and carried his vision away on the coloured advertisements decorating the band between top and bottom decks.
Deprived so suddenly he felt for a cigarette, but there was half an hour yet for the playtime break. And he still had to deal with the present class before they went to geography at ten o’clock. The noise broke into him, sunk him down to reality like cold water entering a ship. They were the eldest rag-mob of the school, and the most illiterate, a C stream of fourteen-year-old louts raring to leave and start work at the factories round about. Bullivant the rowdiest subsided only after his head was well turned from the window; but the noise went on. The one feasible plan was to keep them as quiet as possible for the remaining months, then open the gates and let them free, allow them to spill out into the big wide world like the young animals they were, eager for fags and football, beer and women and a forest of streets to roam in. The responsibility would be no longer his, once they were packed away with the turned pages of his register into another, more incorrigible annexe than the enclave of jungle he ruled for his living. He would have done whatever could be done with such basically unsuitable and unwilling scholars.
‘All right,’ he called out in a loud clear voice, ‘let’s have a little quietness in the room.’ Though the noise persisted, an air of obedience reigned. Mr Raynor was not a strict disciplinarian, but he had taught for twenty-five years, and so acquired a voice of authority that was listened to. Even if he didn’t hit them very often, it was realized that he was not a young man and could easily do so. And it was consciously felt that there was more force behind a middle-aged fist than a young and inexperienced one. Consequently when he told them to keep quiet, they usually did.
‘Take out your Bibles,’ he said, ‘and open them at Exodus, chapter six.’
He watched forty-five hands, few of them clean, unaccountably opening the Bible, as they did all books, from the back and working to the front. Now and again he caught the flicker of brightly coloured illustrations at different points in the class, on their way through a welter of pages. He leaned forward on the high desk, one elbow supporting his forehead, seeing Bullivant whisper to the boy next to him, and hearing the boy giggle.
‘Handley,’ Mr Raynor demanded with a show of sternness, ‘who was Aaron?’
A small boy from the middle of the class stood up: ‘Aaron from the Bible, sir?’
‘Yes. Who else, you ass?’
‘Don’t know, sir,’ the boy answered, either because he really didn’t, Mr Raynor told himself, or by way of revenge for being called an ass.
‘Didn’t you read the chapter yesterday I told you to read?’
Here was a question he could answer. ‘Yes, sir,’ came the bright response.
‘Well then, who was Aaron?’
His face was no longer bright. It became clouded as he admitted: ‘I’ve forgot, sir.’
Mr Raynor ran a hand slowly over his forehead. He changed tack.‘NO!’ he yelled, so loudly that the boy jumped. ‘Don’t sit down yet, Handley.’ He stood up again. ‘We’ve been reading this part of the Bible for a month, so you should be able to answer my questions. Now: Who was the brother of Moses?’
Bullivant chanted from behind:
‘Then the Lord said unto Moses
All the Jews shall have long noses
Exceptin’ Aaron
He shall ’ave a square’un
And poor old Peter
He shall ’ave a gas-meter!’
The low rumble reached Mr Raynor, and he saw several half-tortured faces around Bullivant trying not to laugh. ‘Tell me, Handley,’ he said again, ‘who was the brother of Moses?’
Handley’s face became happy, almost recognizable under the unfamiliar light of inspiration, for the significance of the chanted verse had eaten its way through to his understanding. ‘Aaron, sir,’ he said.
‘And so’ — Mr Raynor assumed he was getting somewhere at last — ‘who was Aaron?’
Handley, who had considered his ordeal to be over on hearing a subdued cheer of irony from Bullivant, lifted a face blank in defeat. ‘Don’t know, sir.’
A sigh of frustration, not allowed to reach the boys, escaped Mr Raynor. ‘Sit down,’ he said to Handley, who did so with such alacrity that the desk lid rattled. Duty had been done as far as Handley was concerned, and now it was Robinson’s turn, who stood up from his desk a few feet away. ‘Tell us who Aaron was,’ Mr Raynor ordered.
Robinson was a brighter boy, who had thought to keep a second Bible open beneath his desk lid for reference. ‘A priest, sir,’ he answered sharply, ‘the brother of Moses.’
‘Sit down, then,’ Mr Raynor said. ‘Now, remember that, Handley. What House are you in, Robinson?’
He stood up again, grinning respectfully. ‘Buckingham, sir.’
‘Then take a credit star.’
After the green star had been fixed to the chart he set one of the boys to read, and when the monotonous drone of his voice was well under way he turned again to span the distance between his high stool and the draper’s window. By uniting the figures and faces of the present assistants, and then by dissolving them, he tried to recapture the carnal vision of the girl who had recently died, a practice of reconstruction that had been the mainstay of his sojourn at this school, a line of sight across the cobbled road into Harrison’s shop, beamed on to the girls who went to work there when they were fifteen and left at twenty to get married. He had become a connoisseur of young suburban womanhood, and thus the fluctuating labour and marriage market made Mr Raynor a fickle lover, causing him too often to forget each great passion as another one walked in to take its place. Each ‘good’ one was credit-starred upon his mind, left behind a trail of memories when it went, until a new ‘good’ one came like a solid fiscal stamp of spiritual currency that drove the other one out. Each memory was thus renewed, so that none of them died.