In the spring of 1916 I asked her for a photograph. It required some courage, and until it arrived, I was in a constant sweat of trepidation that I had gone too far. But it came, a snapshot. Faye, in the country, leaning on a five-barred gate, her curly hair in a loose bun, her smudged, debauched eyes narrowed by her smile. One hand held the top of a dog’s leash and the other the knuckly end of a blackthorn walking stick. On the back she had scribbled, “Shipton-Under-Wychwood. March ’16.” Who had taken it? I wondered. Probably Peter, her son. It was too well composed to be little Gilda’s or Alceste’s work. I opened the accompanying letter and began to read.
Dear John,
Photograph duly enclosed; I hope you like it. Donald took it for me. He comes down most weekends from London. I cannot tell you what a support and kindness he has been since Vincent died. He is sorting out all the dreary problems to do with the will and estate. He sends his best wishes.
There was more stuff about Donald, sweet Donald, but I could not read on. I felt as if I were about to burst into tears. I experienced a sense of such towering injustice that I could hardly speak. What gave Donald Verulam the right, I demanded, to occupy a place in my aunt Faye’s good favor? For what possible reason could he have taken on these responsibilities? On what conceivable grounds did he ingratiate himself with a member of my family, whom he hardly knew? I was outraged, brimming with hurt and disappointment. I, who could only write to her, had to accept that Faye’s life was not centered on my weekly letters as mine was on hers. I was in the grip of an irrational jealously so intense it made me want to vomit.
We like to laugh, do we not, at the baroque passions of high adolescence, but we cannot deny that they control and guide us during those few hot palpitating years. It is an unsettling, overwhelming power and one that most people will never feel so vehemently again, indeed, will never want to be so ruthlessly led by. Adult life, if it is to function at all, demands a moderation of these extremes. From time to time, however, they break out — lava cracking the pumice — and dominate with the same rampaging potency. What is lust, adult lust, after all, but the desire to recapture the heady sensations of adolescent sexuality?
Personally, I have never lost that youthful capacity to feel, in its raw vital state. Thank God. This is what sets me apart from the many, hamstrung by decorum and convention, stifled by notions of respect and status. Even today, I can reexperience my seventeen-year-old jealousy, feel its grip at my throat, its claw in my guts. It was unfocused and indiscriminate. I did not see Donald Verulam as a rival, more as an interloper, destroying an ideal duality. But it would not let me go. I could not forget my love for Faye, could think only that he was there with her, and I was apart. One idea came to dominate my thoughts: I had to see her, if only for a few hours. I had to run away.
“What do you expect’s going to happen?” Hamish asked unsympathetically, when I told him my plan. “Do you think she’ll want to marry you the instant she claps eyes on you?” This was what I did not want to hear. I knew he was right. Faye Hobhouse, attractive widow, was being comforted through her period of mourning by Donald Verulam. They were two adults. I was a seventeen-year-old boy. But a darker fear, a more profound dismay tugged at me, unarticulated. All I knew was that I had to see her, present myself to her as I now was, erase the image of the child she had kissed at Waverley Station. I tried to make Hamish see this.
“But then what?”
I did not know and confessed as much. All I knew was that I had to interpose myself between Faye and Donald Verulam. I had to see her and let her see me.
Hamish agreed to help, even though he thought I was a complete fool. In fact I think he admired my single-mindedness, however crazily motivated. We made plans for my escape. We pooled our financial resources, which proved more than adequate. The subterfuge was simple. Before dinner on Sunday there was a roll call, as there was at every meal. After dinner I would cycle not to Galashiels or Thornielee but in the other direction to more distant Innerleithen. There I would buy a ticket to London and board a 10:30 train, which, after a couple of changes, would get me to Reston, arriving there in plenty of time to meet the 11:55 overnight express from Edinburgh to London, King’s Cross. I chose Innerleithen to forestall for as long as possible any information emerging about my destination. People buying tickets to London were rare enough events as it was on that Tweed Valley branch line. I would be easily remembered. Minto would send Angus to Thornielee and Galashiels as soon as my absence was discovered. I might get a day or two’s start before they thought of asking further up or down the line.
There lay between us the unspoken knowledge that Hamish would become implicated. He would do his best to cover up my absence in the dormitory. A simple lie — that I had been taken ill and put to bed in the small sanitorium upstairs — would be sufficient. Our dormitory leader, a simple lad called Corcoran, would think nothing untoward, especially if Hamish made the pretense of taking my toothbrush and pajamas upstairs. Such complicity would inevitably result in a flogging from Minto. As we discussed the details of the escape (where to hide a bicycle, where to get enough carbide for the lamp — it was a fourteen-mile journey to Innerleithen), I became more upset at the price Hamish would have to pay.
“He’ll flog you,” I blurted out.
“Bound to happen one day.”
“Look, just promise me, don’t let him flog you twice. Tell him everything straightaway.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not that brave.”
I wanted to touch him in some way — show my immense gratitude — but I knew it was out of the question.
“I won’t forget this, Malahide,” I said, my voice cracking slightly.
“You helped me once,” he said. “Just paying you back.”
A fortnight after Faye had sent me her photograph, I left school to join her. It was May 24, 1916. That night for dinner we had mutton broth and rabbit and onions. Hamish gave me most of his portion. After dinner we had an hour of free time before we were required to be in the schoolhouse. Lights-out was at 9 P.M.
Hamish and I met by the side of the stable block and walked through the small wood, past the art rooms, and on to a spinney of trees where we had hidden the bicycle. It was a fresh cool evening with high, heavy cloud. There was a smell of honey in the air from the sycamores and a circling wood lark whispered high above us. A dull, bluey light lay over everything.
I was going to cycle along a dirt track that led to the home farm, skirt that and its noisy dogs on foot, then freewheel down the steep lane that led to the Galashiels-Innerleithen road. If all went well I should arrive at the station just after ten. The one obstacle we had not managed to overcome was my apparel. I still wore my kilt (hunting Stewart) and my short coat. We arrived at school in our uniforms and departed thus: our own clothes were forbidden. I was by now quite unselfconscious in my kilt, but for the first time in my life was leaving Scotland for England. Somehow, the thought of being kilted in London unsettled me. But there was nothing to be done. I had a long overcoat and with a bit of luck anyone catching sight of my stockinged legs beneath it might think I was wearing plus fours.
I pulled the bicycle out from a clump of bracken. We debated whether to ignite the carbide, but I decided to wait until it got darker. I felt a sudden foreboding: my reason belatedly asserting itself. Fool, it seemed to say, abandon this mad idea.… But it was too late now.