My Dear I Wanted to Tell You Read Free Page A

miniature Roger Fry on my hands.’
    ‘What’s a Roger Fry, sir?’ said Riley.
    ‘Pour me a whisky and I’ll tell you.’
    *
    ‘Well, he’s bettering himself, isn’t he?’ said Mrs Briggs to Mrs Purefoy, when she called at the house one day to take him to buy a shirt, he was growing so fast. Mrs Briggs had bought him a shirt only two months before, but she didn’t want to make anything of it.
    Bethan was glad he wasn’t running around with those boys at the station any more, but she wasn’t happy. It wasn’t just that the son of a free working man was – sort of – in service, because he wasn’t in service, quite. If he was in service, how come he was going to school each day, and how come he and the girl Miss Waveney were down Portobello together that time with that giant black dog as if it was theirs, gawking at the Snake Lady and sharing a bag of humbugs? And it wasn’t that he was getting educated beyond his station, because she knew that education meant a lot to John, though, herself, she didn’t see the point as he wasn’t so much learning a trade, was he? It wasn’t even that she didn’t see enough of him – who would expect to see a big working schoolboy of fourteen, except to feed him and make him wash if you were lucky? Many women didn’t see their working boy from one year’s end to the next. What bothered her was that he didn’t talk the same. He tried to hide it from her, when he came home, but she knew. He was learning to talk proper. They might not have done it on purpose but they had transformed him, from a blob of a boy into – well, it wasn’t clear what.
    *
    Robert Waveney and Sir Alfred were about to go to the Queen’s Hall to hear the marvellous Russian, Rachmaninoff, playing his new piano concerto, under Mengelberg. Riley, it turned out, was coming too.
    ‘He’ll appreciate it more than I will,’ Sir Alfred said truthfully. ‘In fact – actually, Robert, what do you think of this – his school chucks them all out at the end of the year – what shall we do with him? I was thinking more school.’
    ‘He wouldn’t get into Eton, surely,’ Waveney said. ‘He’s hardly educated at all, is he?’
    ‘Well, now, selfishly, I don’t want to send him away. And one doesn’t want to encourage any . . . illusions . . . or any sense of injustice. About money and so on. Resentments. I thought perhaps Marylebone Grammar . . .’
    Waveney agreed that that would be more appropriate, and knew one of the governors. Riley, whose dad had told him, ‘You’re lucky if you even get one opportunity in your entire life, and when you do, I advise you to recognise it and grab it by the bollocks, and don’t let go,’ swelled with joy. A school where everybody wanted to be there was a revelation to him; the teachers spread panoplies of glorious knowledge before him, and when the other lads mocked him for this or that he hit them. All was as it should be, and he strode the territory fearlessly.
    It was hard walking past the end of his parents’ street each day without having time to stop in and say hello, but he had so much to do, working like a demon at his studies, and at his duties, not to let Sir Alfred down. As well he always wanted to see what his mentor had been painting each day, and he couldn’t bear to miss any visitors – men of the world, blasé young students, knights of this and that, Nadine – or interesting outings where he could carry Sir Alfred’s sketching things and hear what he had to say about ancient Egypt or Sebastiano del Piombo or whatever turned up. And he needed time to draw, himself, because it seemed he wasn’t bad, actually . . . not good, but not bad . . .
    Patterns and habits grew up, and it all seemed very normal. Time passed, and it was normal. Even for Bethan, the sudden lurches of maternal loss subsided after a year or two. They were lucky. Placing a boy was like marrying off a daughter – the good parents’ first responsibility. And Riley was,