Free Lord Dismiss Us by Michael Campbell Page A

but she consoled herself with the fact that he seemed to smile the whole time.
    This man puzzled her, tantalised her . . . very nearly obsessed her. It was not solely the mystery of the sphinx. One had to admit that he was alarmingly handsome. She had several times caught her breath when there was a sudden squeak of buckled shoes and a Roman Emperor came round the corner, (or else the Grand Inquisitor); the face white as marble, the hair black as night. (He refrained entirely from speech – not even a ‘good morning’). And there was, too, the tendency to regard all men in Orders as in some sort potential Confessors. How unlikely, and yet how dangerously possible, with this one.
    She was of the opinion that the Chaplain had suffered, and was suffering. She was even beginning to think that he did have to eat cold duck instead of shepherd’s pie. But it was more than the stomach; more even than the pitiful ginger-haired boys leaping into blue water. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And she was a woman of similar ilk.
    She had accepted it now, and was making the best – or worst – of it, but the one action Mrs Crabtree could not understand on God’s part was His giving her a brain as well as her brown eyes. At Oxford, and home at the vicarage in Dorset, her brown eyes had attracted, and the brain dispatched, all her contemporaries who were remotely human. It was not that the young men took unreasonable flight. The flight was fair. She had already, against her own wishes, detected and been bored by their stupidity. In misery she had filled an entire exercise-book with poems on the theme – ‘I am not as other women are.’
    In her thirties, a classical scholar with an invalid father, she had met Philip Crabtree, who was Headmaster of a Dorset prep school. He had fallen for both eyes and brain, and persuaded her, correctly, that as educationalists he and she would make an excellent pair. She had suffered frequent bouts of despair ever since. But she prayed much, and fervently believed. Her husband did neither of these things. She would have wished him in vestments, handing her the Bread and Wine.
    He had declared his intention of holding Scripture classes – (he was teaching nothing else) – but she knew perfectly well that it was merely to emphasise his patriarchal position, and to deprive the Chaplain of what would otherwise be a monopoly in their great Founder’s oft-quoted blueprint for Weatherhill.
    As for Lucretia, the child had the eyes and her father’s brain, but even so she appeared to take a sour view already of existence. Perhaps her mother had transferred it, unwittingly. Perhaps School would cure it.
    ‘Why can’t I go in these?’
    ‘Because nobody goes to Church in jeans. Where is your tartan skirt?’
    ‘Why do I have to go at all?’

    The Headmaster, in his dressing-room next door, was having difficulty in deciding between his six suits. He, too, could foresee the significance of the approaching ceremony, and was not sure what kind of appearance to make. It was important, because he had always gone to church for this reason; of necessity, as a schoolmaster. His wife went for the other reason, and it was an increasingly disturbing division between them. As they grew apart, old accepted differences took on new life and developed alarmingly.
    Not to be able to decide on a suit! In the last few days he had been afflicted by uncertainty for the first time in his life. He was noticing it now whenever it appeared, like spots on the body. Certainty was the essence of his whole reputation. Certainty, and the making of decisions.
    There had been no rest this sabbath: an alarming discussion with the Bursar about the school’s finances; a distressing visit from Lord Mountheath, who wanted quick results.
    His narrow window looked out on to Buckinghamshire in the rain. All day, more than two hundred boys had occupied themselves indoors. At what? Where? In this, and in the larger sense, he