Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

no exception was called for – he worked for the delight of working and wasting no time in asking why some shapes, colours, textures made him happy. Indeed, Mr Atherton had never had a harder-working pupil, one who came voluntarily all through the summer holidays; and once, when he found that Richard was unable to construe Sir Joshua’s serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco, he warned him solemnly that he must not neglect his Latin and his sums, and all that sort of thing, as being of the greatest use in after-life.

      So his time went by, in a golden haze, and memory did not serve to break it down into its elements: it remained an infinitely distant period of normality, when happiness was in the natural order of events. In those days he passed continually from one world to another (or even between three, if his low school, his upper-middle-class Philistine home and Mr Atherton’s studio were all to be set at equal intervals) but it scarcely worried him, and if at odd moments he had a suspicion that he did not entirely belong to any one of them, that he did not quite seem to belong anywhere, it did not then seem to have any immediate importance. After all, his mother was always there at home; school was not at all unpleasant, but for the confinement and the waste of time; and he could at least aspire to Mr Atherton’s spacious way of life.

      In this golden haze he could not now distinguish near and far: he could scarcely make out its most general chronology, even after probing back to link events with the seasons in which they occurred; but it must have lasted for years – perhaps for three. Most of the time, as he remembered it, seemed to have been summer; and certainly it was summer when first he began painting the backgrounds to Mr Atherton’s big commissioned canvases. The umber landscape came back to him, the first one he ever did, with its four brown trees in the distance: then again he was painting Mrs Foster’s shoes, handbag and parasol, left for the purpose; and at another time Apollo’s hams, under the admiring gaze of Colonel Apse, who was to occupy the middle of the heroic picture, a more gentlemanly Mars, and who posed to that effect, in moistened drapery, all August through. But there must have been winters too, for he saw the lonely pond again, and felt the thin ice bow as he skated round and round in the gathering darkness. He was alone and it was perfectly silent except for his skates and the strange pervasive sighing of the ice as it bent; the outlines of the pond were vague – blurred scraggy trees rearing up as he sped by – and the ice was black. In his delight he raced across the middle from time to time, promising, if he passed over the thinnest ice again, that he would do whatever he most disliked. What was it? That had faded past recall (some domestic virtue, no doubt); but he remembered the peculiar silence of the cold – the cold’s own silent nature – and his solitary dark flying on the ice.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Yet quite suddenly and with no clear warning his life went bad: in those days he could not see why it was so nor tell exactly how it began, yet now as he looked backwards the division was as sharp as that between light and dark.

      The first, the most obvious but by far the least important cause was that by mere seniority he was moved up into the headmaster’s form. Old Mott had the usual schoolmaster’s perversion and he was an ugly man with a cane; Richard was a fine juicy boy, which was provocation enough, but his ignorance of Latin was also a real, almost legitimate, offence to Mott, who, with a dirty gleam in his eye, began to call him out almost every day. There had always been a great deal of beating at Easton school, but up to that time Richard had escaped: he would have gone on escaping, however much he excited Mott, if the man, who was very close to the shopkeeping gossip of the town, had not heard things that made him sure that Richard would have no protectors to resent this treatment, and that in any case he would not be staying long.

      When it became clear that Richard was to be this year’s scapegoat, there was a movement away from him, as from one who attracted ill-luck. One or two of his friends continued to sympathise with him, and to the very end Ham would whisper him the word; but few of the boys were really on his side, and as Mott beat to an audience, being sensitive in his own way to public opinion, this meant that he was beaten more often and more viciously. Before this time he had been neither particularly liked nor disliked in the school, but now he became unpopular. He was aware that he was cut off from the support of the class: it is a wretched thing to learn that the unfortunate are often disliked, but this was almost the only thing that he did learn in this school, apart from the fact that he had much more fortitude of a passive kind than he had known, and that the limits of endurance were a great deal farther off than seemed likely.

      The dark stagnant air of the cell vibrated with a tremor so deep that it lay somewhere between feeling and sound, a huge explosion far away. Three times it was repeated, with intervals of great solemnity; and while Richard Temple was still poised up on the echo of the third there was a burst of fire much closer to – not quite so close as the usual firing-squad perhaps, but he put it down to that until it grew ragged, no longer volleys but an almost continuous firing that went on for several minutes. Nothing but percussive noises ever came down here from the outside and when the firing stopped it stopped without any explanatory shouting or the stamp of troops: the rare intrusions from the other world were generally inexplicable and as they were always irrelevant to Temple’s own battle in principle he did not try to account for them – he had little more curiosity left than he had humour, and what curiosity he had he dared not indulge: a dispersion of energy. But today the case was altered: he wondered, surmised, brought up ingenious explanations; but if he had hit upon the truth he would have run mad with mingled joy and even greater apprehension.

      The Allied armies were deep in France: the French forces of the interior had risen and they were attacking from within, disrupting the Germans’ communications and harassing their retreat. In this region their initial attack had been very successful and the Germans were in a state of confusion: in some places they were withdrawing without a shot, abandoning everything; in others they were systematically destroying their fortifications, stores and records and killing their prisoners before pulling out; in others they retreated with lorry-loads of paper and as many hostages as they could lay their hands on; and in others again the different commands acted without any attempt at co-ordination, some following one policy and some another. The situation was worst wherever there were large numbers of those armed French collaborators called Miliciens; they were vicious, stupid people in any case, and now they were quite desperate, out of hand, panic-stricken, and dangerous. Here in Villefranche, a strategically unimportant town, the garrison was largely made up of these creatures, together with a half-company of Vlassov’s Russians and a few Mongols; they were in a state of frantic disorder; for a small local group of maquisards, over-excited by the blowing-up of the ammunition-dump at Combray, had begun a totally unexpected attack. Even the Germans were infected by this feeling of being trapped: only half an hour earlier they had been at peace, at a sort of back-line peace; the war had been a hundred and seventy kilometres away and even if the worst should happen the road to the north was perfectly secure: now everything was turned upside down. There was no order any more.

      Richard did not divine this, however; his final answer was army exercises, and some time after the noise had died away he returned. That is to say, he sank back to the edge of the place where he had been interrupted; but he stayed for a long time on this edge alone, without advancing. For although in this course of identification, or re-identification, he was dealing only with the truth, not with apology nor scarcely with comment even, and although he was no longer moved by old shame and humiliation (the last things to die in recollection) being so far removed, yet still there was this unbearably painful area. With him remembrance was largely a matter of images which followed one another with a logic of their own (not unlike dreams) and although many of them were vague enough, filled out with words and exposition, some were extraordinarily brilliant – the sudden sight, from a darkened place, of a person, or a head, or a whole series of incidents that would go on, outside his control and in a wonderfully vivid light, so that every colour and detail was there unblurred; and in the case of his mother he could not permit this undisciplined recall. The most he could do, even now, with all his removal and all his adult experience and nearer comprehension, was to state the facts, in an impersonal, almost statistical manner, with no dwelling upon them and above all no seeing the things he talked about – no true recall, indeed.

      It