Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ian Howarth was not one of those sentimental nincompoop schoolmasters who choked up at the eloquence of Shakespeare, or any other writer, for that matter. He had nothing but contempt for those who flew easily off the handle, like that Frenchman Ferguson, or showed off their tender patriotic hearts, in fact dressed them in little uniforms and took them on parade with bagpipes howling, like that idiot Carter. Schoolboys who started crying while he had them on the carpet soon felt the lash of his sarcasm. In a few cases he felt compunction afterward, but he simply could not bear trembling lips and imploring, brimming eyes--they made his stomach roil and his breath catch with rage.

So one would think that Bamfylde’s school “sausaging” on the occasion of the Armistice would be nothing but an ordeal. One would think that the sad excuse for a sausage on his plate would be inedible while the boys sang soldiers’ lyrics reminiscent of the more inept passages of Kipling and the less flowery effusions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. One would think that the sight of David Powlett-Jones, the one veteran among the faculty, trying to slip inconspicuously along the whole length of the head table to the door while looking at the wall, would be just one more folly to observe and congratulate himself that Ian Howarth would never make such an exhibition of himself.

Instead he got up and followed. And when he found the boy (only, after all, a few years older than the Sixth-form singers at the front tables) bent over as if he’d taken a football to the solar plexus, why on earth did Ian not retreat? He could shut the door, he thought, leave the youngster to his privacy, get back to sawing the withered object on his plate into masticatible chunks. Instead, with an involuntary, terrifying false grin stretching his face, he tried to chat. “Ah, hullo there, Powlett-Jones.” How horribly banal. “Saw you sneaking off, my dear chap.”

Powlett-Jones pulled himself up and turned completely away, one hand to his mouth. He trembled all over and his shoulders hitched. Yet Ian’s mouth just kept yawping away with no help from his brain: “Obliged to you for the hint. Bit … much, I felt? Still, one can‘t blame them.” A convulsive sniff was the only reply. “Look,” he said, shamed. “Just say the word, and I’ll go away.”

“No,” only a whisper at first. Then Powlett-Jones pulled an unsteady voice from somewhere and went on, glancing over his shoulder, “No, it’s all right. I thought it was over. Feeling that way about it.”

“Here,” said Ian because he could not weep, “why not come up to my rooms? Nothing elaborate! I simply propose to drink gin at a slow and steady rate until I lapse into total unconsciousness.”

This got what was meant to be a bark of laughter, then another sniffle or two. “Yes,” Powlett-Jones said, “yes, I should be delighted.”

After that, Howarth simply led the way past the kitchens and out.

~~~

His rooms were claustrophobic with the detritus of housemasters past plus his own accretion of holiday souvenirs, Christmas gifts, and books. At least Herries, in his capacity as Headmaster, had sprung for two good leather armchairs, and Ian had worn one of them enough to put an antimacassar over the back. He waved Powlett-Jones to the other one and provided him with a water glass a third full of Plymouth Gin. The boy drank it almost like water, too.

“You’re forgetting the ‘slow and steady’ part of this plan,” Ian said.

“Ah, sorry! I learned to drink like this over there,” Powlett-Jones replied. “What spirits we could get on the lines were so vile, you didn’t want to give a mouthful time to soak into your taste buds.”

“I shouldn’t have thought strong drink in the trenches was such a fine idea.”

“No. Once--” His breath hissed in, and he didn’t continue with what had happened that once. “But then, the water was often bad. Flux didn’t do much for us either. And the liquor kept out some of the cold.” He shivered with memory. Ian offered him a cigarette, and he took one.

"I’ve heard--” and Ian too stopped himself before anything too inane had a chance to come out.

But he‘d already said too much, apparently. “Yes, heard!” Powlett-Jones said bitterly, pointing at him with the barely-lit Gold Flake. “Hearing is all you could do here! Don’t I know it! That’s why--”

“Yes,” Ian put in, “yes, but isn’t it--” and was interrupted in his turn.

“Of course I don’t want any of those boys, those babies, to know what it’s like out there, freezing mud and bits of men you knew hung on the barbed wire and--”

“Powlett--”

“--and the shelling all night and screams you hardly could tell from what direction, yours or theirs or some bomb on its way down and the sobbing in the night--”

“--my dear chap--”

“--and the rats, God, the rats.” The liquid leapt in the glass, he was shaking so hard, and then he seemed to notice and gulped it down though the glass clinked against his teeth, then pulled fiercely at the cigarette.

“My dear chap,” Howarth repeated softly. “It’s over.”

Powlett-Jones breathed out smoke, sighed, then tilted the glass and looked into it. “So they tell me,” he said. “Sorry. I suppose I haven’t the proper English stiff upper lip!”

“The hell with that,” Ian said, irritated. “I hope I’m not such a coward that I can’t bear simply hearing about suffering. It’s you, what it does to you to say it!”

Powlett-Jones stared at him. “That’s kind, Howarth,” he said. “But saying nothing’s corrosive in another way.”

“Then say what you like.”

But Powlett-Jones was silent.

“Here, I’ll get you another.” Ian poured for them both and poked at the fire into the bargain before Powlett-Jones spoke.

“That‘s what Beth said.”

“Who?”

“A girl I met. A nurse, actually.”

The resentment Ian felt surprised him. “So you opened your heart to her?” He pictured a pretty young thing, smoothing the sheet perhaps, or that forelock that liked to fall onto Powlett-Jones’ forehead. Ian’s free hand clenched on the chair arm until the leather creaked.

Powlett-Jones shook his head, then tipped it back against the leather. “It’s odd, but when she said that I didn’t need to any more. It was the same just now, with you,” and his smile was charming, shy, young and open.

It was Ian’s turn to gulp from his glass. Then he pretended the feeling in his chest was only the burn of the liquor. His mind raced in circles for a joke. “You Celts, so perverse,” was the best he could do, and he felt the blood in his cheeks, with the echo of the last word.

Powlett-Jones’ little crack of laughter was real, this time. “I suppose so,” he said and turned his head toward the fire. He sipped and stared at the flames.

Ian lit a new cigarette of his own, keeping his eyes on the match until it was tossed in the grate and gone. He drew in smoke for a minute or so before trying again. “Do we seem terribly provincial and sheltered, then?”

“Oh, no. Or, to be honest, yes, but not so much about the war. Nobody who hasn’t been in the trenches knows about it, or wants to. It’s taking me more time to get my head round the rest of this--” He gestured around the crowded, dingy little room. “This’d be the height of giddy luxury at home, but I know you don’t think so.”

“No!” Ian was the one who snorted with laughter now. “I certainly don’t.”

“What kind of people do you come from, Howarth? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“Nothing special. Mother a prebendary’s daughter, father a doctor. Like something out of Barchester Towers.”

“You see? Imagine what that looks like to a miner’s son.”

“Nobody cares for that, P-J. Not when they meet you.”

“Oh, some of them do!”

“You mustn’t hold an empty-headed vegetable like Carter to the standards of the vertebrate creation.”

Powlett-Jones laughed again, then drank. Ian tapped ash off his Gold Flake and sipped.

“M’father was an atheist,” he ventured. “Said that when you’d seen babies die of dysentery and measles, there was no sense trying to believe in a merciful God. I inherited it, you might say. But there is something I do believe. The dead demand that we remember them.” And then, very deliberately, “They’ll haunt our nightmares if we don’t.”

“They do that! Oh, they do.”

“Then tell me about one of them. Just any one, and make sure you won’t dream tonight.”

“I thought the gin was supposed to take care of that.” Powlett-Jones stared at the glass he had lifted in illustration and said as if surprised, “Oh, it’s empty.”

Opening a new bottle, Ian poured him another, but pulled the drink back just as Powlett-Jones reached for it. “The story?” Ian asked, and Powlett-Jones smiled again and took the glass.

“It’s two men I’m thinking of,” he said. “They both went west. I think you reminded me, taking me under your wing just now when I was piping my eye. Just after they promoted me, this was. We got raw recruits to replace three of our dead men, and one of them was Jimmy Easterly. He was a little scared rabbit, rather like Meredith, remember him?”

Ian nodded. “Of course I do. The Lower Fourth nearly drove him to a nervous breakdown.”

“They did that! Well, imagine him in a trench. He cried every night for his mam. It’s one thing to hear a snuffle or two, but he got on everyone’s nerves, he did. A young thug named Fenton used to try to kick him to sleep, but his mate Henry Harper stood up for him. One night I remember getting up for a sip of water and seeing Harper with Easterly fast asleep on his lap, just like a little babby. I’m not sure he didn’t have his thumb in his mouth.” As he spoke, Powlett-Jones slipped almost imperceptibly down in the chair, his tie working itself askew above his waistcoat, until his elbows on the chair arms were nearly at shoulder-level. “Well, we were taking a pounding around then. Barely held the line, and little Easterly was wound up so tight I thought he’d snap any time. I noticed that, ironically, I wasn’t hearing him cry in the night any more. I was afraid to say anything, thought he’d be spooked back into it, but I decided to take a look the next time I had the energy to get up once I’d had a kip.” He turned his head to look into the fire again--it had burned down a bit--and the light bronzed his hair and lit sparks in his eyes.

After a lengthy pause, Ian asked, “And did you?”

“Yes,” Powlett-Jones said, and grinned self-deprecatingly. “I don’t know why I’m telling this.”

“Because I asked.”

“You did, didn’t you? Your own fault then. So I did wake, and just lay for a moment trying to tell myself I was curious enough to leave my warm, and I could hear an odd sound, wasn’t sure what, a kind of squeak or grunt or something.”

The point of the story swept over Ian as if someone had dumped a pail of water over him, and he sat bolt upright.

“Yes,” said Powlett-Jones with a glinting grin. “I spied the two of them, at it right there in Easterly’s pallet, his back to Harper’s front and trou’s round their ankles, and the men around them either fast asleep or ignoring it. I was all green, Haworth, green as leeks, and I stood there like a stock trying to work out whether I ought to put them on report or what.”

“And--” Ian had to clear his throat and start again. “And did you?”

“What d’you take me for, then? No. They gave each other a bit of comfort, that’s how I saw it, and I was never sorry, for they both bought it within the week. So what good would having them court-martialled have done?”

“None,” and Ian sat back again and regarded the other man with approval.

Powlett-Jones seemed to misinterpret his silence and said uncertainly, like a Fifth-former rethinking an answer in oral revision, “Things went on there, you know, that wouldn’t do if they happened, oh, here.”

Ian left the cigarette in his mouth, rising to get another refill. “You really are a very tolerant young chap, Powlett-Jones.” Had that sounded too heartfelt? He made his voice still drier as he poured into one glass, then the other: “Very civil of you to sit there, and drink my gin and smoke my cigarettes, listen to my maudlin indiscretions.”

“That’s all right,” said Powlett-Jones, and then as if he’d only belatedly heard, “You haven’t been indiscreet, have you?”

“Not yet! But I feel the urge coming upon me,” Ian said. Nothing like the true word spoken in jest.

The thing to do, he thought as he handed back his guest’s glass, was to try to think of himself at that age. It seemed a lifetime ago. At that age--ah, of course. “Powlett-Jones, do you know Heine?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Turning toward the fireplace, Ian was stopped by Powlett-Jones’ “Is he in your house?”

Ian had to look to be sure he wasn’t being ragged. “Good God, no. What a strange chap you are! I was referring to the poet. The German poet. Irony again, you see.” He stood straighter just remembering how he’d memorized and recited Heine, especially “Enfant Perdu”: “’But wars and justice have far different laws,” he declaimed, “And worthless acts are often done quite well;/The rascal’s shots were better than his cause,/And I was hit--and hit again, and fell’--appropriate, wouldn’t you say?”

“Appropriate to the whole generation.” Powlett-Jones put out his cigarette.

“And,” Ian said, lifting his glass as if toasting, “ironic.”

Powlett-Jones still looked a bit puzzled. “I thought Heine wrote a lot about love.”

“Oh, he did.” Ian sat down, suddenly weary, and let his head fall back to look at the little crack in the ceiling above the door. “He most indubitably did.”

“Indubitably,“ the boy repeated.

Amy’s young face came into Ian’s mind again, prettier even than her brother’s, though it had been a near thing. He’d said Heine’s poem to her, and he repeated now, “’The old dream comes again to me;/With May-night stars above,/We two sat under the linden tree/And swore eternal love./Again and again we plighted troth…Ah!’” He suddenly threw his cigarette into the fire, and when Powlett-Jones stared, Ian could only mutter, “Tch! Burned my finger.”

“Howarth, have you ever been married?”

“No.” He swallowed. “You?”

“No.” Powlett-Jones’ head fell back as if in despair.

“I nearly was,” Ian confessed. “When I was about your age. Seemed just the thing, what with the Heine, and so on, you know. I was very naïve at your age.” He finished off his gin with a flourish. “Girl did the right thing, though. Married a stockbroker. Wasn’t the financial aspect either. No! She just couldn’t face the bloody awful prospect of a lifetime as a schoolmaster’s wife, that’s what it was, you see.” He hauled himself out of the chair to poke the fire after all. “Miserable prospects! Bleak accommodation. Thoroughly dispiriting companions.” He looked over his shoulder to meet Powlett-Jones’ eyes for the caveat, “Present company excepted, of course. What woman in her senses would take that on?”

“There’s…Mr. and Mrs. Herries,” Powlett-Jones said, so the nurse was still evidently in his mind.

“Oh,” Ian hastened to say, “that man’s a law unto himself. I‘m talking about ordinary mortals, like you and me. No, if you want to stick it, put all thought of tender domesticity from your mind.” He turned away from the younger man’s disappointed face. “And alone. ’Withouten any companie.’ Treasure the small compensations, P-J. A little temporary power. Toasting your own muffins, not having to share them. Bed socks in winter, snowflaked with sheet fluff. It’s a bachelor’s life, Powlett-Jones, my dear chap, you’d better face up to it.”

The boy was unconvinced, of course, but too drunk to argue. “I’d better go,” was all he said.

“Nonsense, we’re only about halfway through our programme! Neither of us is dead to the world yet.”

“If I drink much more, I may blub again.”

“Well, you’ve a handkerchief, haven’t you? Go to it.” Ian waved a negligent hand. Powlett-Jones glared at him. “Oh, no,” said Ian, “you’re not one of those belligerent drunks, are you? I’ll be sorry I asked you up here.”

“No, that’s Emrys.” It was a sufficient distraction. “Though he’s a bit of it all the time, belligerent I mean.”

“Your brother?” Ian guessed.

“Yes.”

“I,” said Ian as if it were of the greatest importance, “am an only child.”

Powlett-Jones sputtered with laughter, and Ian joined him, the laughter feeding on itself and then fading slowly into chuckles. By that time they were both sprawled in the chairs, legs stretched out, and Ian’s antimacassar was scrunched behind his back.

Ian hitched himself up in his seat. Powlett-Jones stayed slumped; indeed, he looked nearly unconscious. The gin seemed to have hit him all at once. His dark lashes lay against his flushed cheeks. Even his ears were red, and his lips puffed out for exhalations that seemed more like weak whistling. His knees had spayed apart and the tweed of his trousers was taut across his groin.

While the boy’s eyes were closed, what harm could it do to look at him? Ian took note of each detail, from the mussed hair to the scuffs on the turned-out shoes’ toes. And if his gaze dwelt on the parted lips, the bony wrists extending from slightly frayed shirt-cuffs, and the bulge under the tweed flies, who was there to know? Only Ian, storing the vision up for tomorrow night, and the nights after that when he would only have fantasy--withouten any companie.

For instance, Ian could touch Powlett-Jones if he chose. Right now. He could take one step, or perhaps it would need two, and kneel on his own rug between the boy’s legs. If he tried, he’d be able to twitch one fly button after another out of the button-holes without pulling too much. Then it would be easy to slip one hand inside the rough linen pants, and his mind filled with the soft warm flesh he’d touch, draw out, take into his mouth--

Powlett-Jones was looking back at him.

Ian jumped in his seat, the cloth of his own trousers rasping against the too-clear evidence of his fantasy. He was breathing through his mouth, too. He shut it, and rubbed his lips with one hand while the other felt for his packet of Gold Flakes.

“Whatever were you thinking of?” The question was asked almost without inflection, and Powlett-Jones blinked lazily as Ian cast about for an answer.

“Amy,” he lied. “The young lady I spoke of, don’t you know. A long time ago.” He held the paper packet in his fingers, squeezed it, and looked as candid as he could manage.

“And you still feel like that about her?” The boy’s gesture was vague, but Ian knew it must mean the erection that Ian could neither ignore nor force to subside.

“Hm. Yes,” he said shortly.

“After all this time. Does the past never leave, then? Are we , what are we, what does it matter? How much we drink? If I’m still thinking of her, of them, when I’m--” He brought his hands to his face, the picture of despair.

“It’s not that, not like that,” Ian said, horrified. Dropping the packet, he pulled at the arms of the chair, and lurched to his feet, half-falling as he stood, half-stumbling as he took one pace and then another to Powlett-Jones’ side. Once there, though, he didn’t know what to do: his hands went out to the boy but hovered a few inches away from touch, shaking.

Powlett-Jones reached blindly up, met one of Ian’s hands and grasped it hard. Ian let the other settle on the boy’s head, tangling his fingers in the thick hair, helplessly stroking it. After a time, he managed to say, “We’re back at the starting point, I think,” though his voice was rough and its cynical poise quite gone.

Under his hands, Powlett-Jones shook his head. “Not blubbing,” he said.

Ian had meant his own feelings. No human creature he’d known had made him so want to comfort and shelter it. Now the impulse was even stronger than it had been outside Big Hall. From moment to moment he tried to ignore the flashing conviction that his life was changing, had changed already, that he was leaning like a plant toward the heat and light of this young man: David Powlett-Jones, former shell-shock patient and junior master of History and English, with a girl he was thinking of marrying somewhere in the background. What on earth was to be done?

“Let the gin blunt it, that sharp edge,” he told them both. “Let it go, let it all go. Tomorrow--” and there was no bromide ready to his tongue, but Powlett-Jones nodded as if he had produced one.

“Yes,” he said, and unbent his arms, lying in the chair and gazing up at Ian. “May I stay?”

“In this state? My dear chap--” My dear, rang in Ian’s brain, my dear-- “Herries would have my head if I let you go! Imagine stumbling across the quad in full view of the windows….”

But Powlett-Jones only sighed and shut his eyes. His fingers loosened around Ian’s and the hand dropped. Ian thrust his own hand into his pocket, pressing it against his thigh, and stared down at the sleeping man for a long while before pulling himself away and seeking his own cold bed.

~~~