Other people sat down in the dining-car, a sprinkling at the empty tables. The stout waiter carried round a tray of metal tea-pots. The children talked about the terms they’d spent at Ravenswood Court and St Cecilia’s, and about the people at these two similar boarding-schools. The headmaster of Ravenswood Court, C. R. Deccles, was known as the Craw, and his wife as Mrs Craw; Miss Scuse was the headmistress of St Cecilia’s. At Ravenswood Court there was a master called Quiet-Now Simpson, who couldn’t keep order, and a master called Dymoke – Geography and Divinity – who was known as Dirty Dymoke because he’d once confessed that he had never in his life washed his hair. Quiet-Now Simpson had kipper feet.
At St Cecilia’s little Miss Malabedeely taught History and was fifty-four, bullied by Miss Shaw and Miss Rist. Miss Shaw was moustached and had a hanging jaw, all teeth and gums; Miss Rist was forever knitting brown cardigans. They were jealous because Miss Malabedeely had once been engaged to an African bishop. They often spoke of Africa in a disparaging manner, and when they were speaking of something else they had a way of abruptly ceasing when Miss Malabedeely entered a room. ‘We’ll go on with that later,’ Miss Rist would say, sighing while she looked at Miss Malabedeely. There were other teachers at St Cecilia’s, and other masters at Ravenswood, but they weren’t so interesting to talk about.
In the dining-car Kate imagined, as she often had before, Quiet-Now Simpson’s kipper feet and Dirty Dymoke. And Stephen quite vividly saw the fortitude on the face of little damson-cheeked Miss Malabedeely let down by an African bishop, and Miss Shaw’s landscape of teeth and gum and Miss Rist forever knitting cardigans. He imagined the bullying of Miss Malabedeely, the two women breaking off their conversation whenever she entered a room. That term, he said, a boy called Absom had discovered Quiet-Now Simpson and Mrs Craw alone in a summer-house, sitting close to one another.
‘You pour the tea,’ he said.
They went on talking about the schools and then they talked about the party that morning in the lounge of the hotel, at which there’d been champagne and chicken in aspic and cream cheese in bits of celery stalks and smoked salmon on brown bread.
‘Toasted tea-cake, madam?’ the stout waiter offered.
‘Yes, please.’
The conversation about schools and the wedding party was a way of filling in the time, or of avoiding what seemed to Kate to be a more important conversation: was Stephen as happy as she was about their parents’ marriage? It was more of an upheaval for Stephen, having to move with his father to Sea House, where she and her mother had always lived. As they ate their toasted tea-cakes it occurred to her that Stephen might never refer to the subject at all, that this single conversation might be difficult between them. His mother was dead: did he resent someone else in her place? Did he resent all of a sudden having a sister? Being friends was one thing; all this was rather different.
They added raspberry jam to brown bread and butter. They watched a station going by, in a heavy, dismal downpour. Leaning on a brush, a damp porter looked back at them from the platform. Machine Engraving, it said on a poster, Archer Signs Ltd.
‘D’you think you’ll like living in Sea House, Stephen?’
He was still looking out of the window. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, not turning his head.
‘It’ll be all right.’
‘Yes.’
Already his father had sold Primrose Cottage; already their furniture had been moved to Sea House. Going to live there was apparently the best arrangement, or so his father had explained when telling him about the forthcoming marriage. Kate’s mother had actually been born there and so had Kate. The house was much bigger than Primrose Cottage and more suitable for the four of them in other ways as well. But Primrose Cottage, a mile from Dynmouth, on the Badstoneleigh road, was what Stephen still thought of as his home, with its banks of primroses, and buddleia full of butterflies in the small back garden, and the memory of his mother.
‘You’ll like it, Stephen. The Blakeys are nice.’
‘I know the Blakeys are nice.’ He smiled again, his eyes remaining sombre even though he didn’t want them to. ‘I’m sure it’ll be all right.’
The train rushed through the dismal afternoon, the silence between them had an edge to it. Stephen was often silent, but she knew he was thinking now of their parents’ marriage, and wondering about it. Two facts had made it possible: the divorce of her own parents and the death of his mother. The divorce had happened before she or Stephen could remember. Now and again her father came back to Dynmouth, or to see her at St Cecilia’s, but the visits made her unhappy because his presence caused her to sense the trouble and the pain there’d been. She couldn’t help not liking him, sensing as well that it was he who had been cruel, that he had deserted her mother for the wife he was now married to.
The waiter brought sandwiches and more hot water and then a tray full of cellophane-wrapped pieces of fruitcake and slices of Swiss roll. Kate took a slice of Swiss roll and the waiter told her to have another because the slices were small. Stephen took a piece of fruitcake. He undid the cellophane, carefully remembering the past, wanting to because it was relevant on this particular day: the details were preserved, behind some screen in his mind, always available. A time would never come when he’d forget it had been autumn, or forget the slight foreboding he’d felt at being summoned. The undermatron, Miss Tomm, had come into the dormitory and asked him to come with her to the study. The half-past-eight bell had just gone. Lights-out was in a quarter of an hour. ‘Eee, what’s Fleming done?’ Cartwright shouted out, standing by his bed in a checked dressing-gown, with a towel in his hand. He flicked the towel at Stephen, and Miss Tomm sharply told him to leave off.
His father was in the study, sitting in the chair in front of the Craw’s desk, the chair the Craw asked you to sit in when he was going to give you a row. His father hadn’t taken off his overcoat or his scarf.
‘Ah,’ the Craw said when Stephen entered.
The Craw found another chair and drew it up to the desk. He told Stephen to sit on it, in a voice that wasn’t as scratchy as usually it was. His eyes kept darting about. Fingers like sticks were restless on the desk in front of him.
‘Shall I?’ he suggested, raising grey eyebrows at Stephen’s father. ‘Or would …?’
‘I’ll do it, please.’
His father was different also. His cheeks were pale, quite noticeably so in the hard glare of the room’s electric light. Stephen thought he was ill. In the confusion of being so abruptly called out of the dormitory and then finding his father in the study, he could think of no better reason for his father’s presence than that he should have come to Ravenswood Court to tell him that he was ill.
‘Mummy,’ his father said in a peculiar, stuttering kind of voice, quite unlike his usual one. ‘Mummy, Stephen. Mummy …’
He did not go on. He wasn’t looking at Stephen. He was looking down at his open overcoat, at its buttons and the brown and green of its tweed.
‘Is Mummy ill?’
His father controlled himself. When he spoke it was no longer with a stutter. He said: ‘Not ill, Stephen.’
Blood spread into Stephen’s neck and face. He could feel its warmth, and then he felt it draining away.
‘Mummy has died, Stephen.’