William Boyd - The New Confessions

“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.

“You’d better get going,” Hamish said. “Good luck.”

“Right,” I said. I got on the bicycle. “Now, remember—”

“On you go.” He grinned, showing his large teeth. I felt hot-eyed with inarticulate gratitude. He gave me a shove, and I bumped off down the track towards the home farm. I would not see him again for three years.

Everything went as planned, at least on my side. The ride to Innerleithen was actually quite entrancing. The road followed the Tweed, and to my excited eyes the slow river and its fragrant meadows grew ever more hauntingly beautiful in the darkening, dusky light. I bought my ticket to London, one way, third class, price one pound fifteen shillings, and made my connection successfully at Reston.

Sometime after midnight, sharing a smoky, blurry compartment with two sailors and someone who looked like a commercial traveler, I crossed the border into England. I left Scotland behind me and along with it my youth. Even at the time it seemed epochal enough. I knew somehow that nothing would be the same after this particular adventure. I did not think of the future, of my meeting with Faye. I was happy in the present moment, and there was nothing in my past, I felt, to make me want to cherish it. I hunched into my overcoat collar and tried to go to sleep. It took me an hour or so to achieve it. The sailors talked (they were rejoining a dreadnought in Southampton) and drank something from a bottle. The commercial traveler tried to engage me in conversation, but my taciturnity proved too much for him. I looked out at the dark countryside and tried to memorize, as if taking a talismanic inventory, the strange names of the stations we flashed past — Pegswood, Morpeth, Croft and Northallerton — as we traveled down England.

I recount the following events exactly as I recall them happening. I make no excuses for myself or my bizarre behavior. I was seventeen. Please remember.

The sun shone in London. I was astonished at how much warmer it was than Scotland. I felt I had entered another climate. I was not overawed by the city; if anything, the traffic in Edinburgh seemed heavier, though here the noise was more concentrated and the streets were distinctly less clean. I took an underground train from King’s Cross to Paddington. My kilt drew few curious glances. I realized at Paddington, where I saw a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry disembarking, that kilts had become reasonably commonplace south of the border since 1914.

But on the train to Charlbury my neutral composure began to desert me. I looked out of the window at the bland and innocuous countryside and told myself to calm down. Faye would be surprised but glad to see me, I reassured myself. Everything would be fine.

At Charlbury Station I secured directions to the Hobhouses’ address from a cabby. I walked up the hill through the small town, its dullocher buildings looking quite peculiar to me, I recall. It was just after luncheon and the shops were being reopened. I had not eaten since the evening before and, as I passed a baker’s, almost swooned from hunger. I bought a slice of veal and ham pie and checked I was going in the right direction. Everyone appeared to know where Vincent Hobhouse had lived.