School for Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bohun said or did nothing that gave Felix any clue as to how he had failed her, but Mr Posthorn, after testing his knowledge, spoke without hesitation: ‘What on earth have you been doing with yourself since you left school in England?’
    Felix explained that in Baghdad he had taken lessons with an old English lady, an ex-governess to a royal family, who had taught him English composition, French, drawing, geography and history. Unfortunately she had known less Greek, Latin and mathematics than he knew himself. His mother had treated lessons there as a joke and said: ‘Never mind, darling, when the war’s over we’ll make up for lost time.’ The Shiptons, like Mr Posthorn, had been shocked to discover how little Felix knew and had told him that as he would have to earn his living one day, he had better start studying at once for his Matriculation. Mr Posthorn said:
    ‘Your parents ought to have been ashamed of themselves, keeping you away from school during the most important years of your life. I can’t understand it. Your father was an educated man, wasn’t he?’
    Felix explained: ‘It wasn’t my father’s fault. Mother wouldn’t let me go back to England when the war started. Father was cross, but Mother said: “If he goes I may not see him again,” and she wouldn’t have, either.’
    Mr Posthorn said: ‘You’ll never make up for it,’ but Felix, although he knew it to be a serious matter, could not really care. It was as though the important part of his life were already over; only blankness lay ahead. Like the Jerusalem winter, it was only to be suffered and got over. Yet, before his mother’s death, he had begun to feel excited about his life that was, he supposed, just beginning. The war was ending. Soon they would be able to go where they liked – there was the whole world to see. He had begun to have bursts of wild exhilaration. He felt then that something was growing within him that gave an excitement and brilliance and wonder to everything. But when his mother died, the wonder had gone like a light snapped off. He could see no reason for doing anything now. It would be like dressing up, or acting a play, or writing a book, on a desert island. Sometimes, when his own life flickered again in him and he knew the future was still there, he wondered in desperation if he could try and please Miss Bohun. Could he become something – a famous general, say, or an admiral? – to impress her? There was no warmth in the idea. And what would she care?
    At meal-times he would feel drawn to stare at her face, which was colourless as plaster, the eyes nearly always hidden behind the thick, plaster-coloured lids. Even whenshe lifted her face to speak or call Frau Leszno, she would not open her eyes. Her mouth was never more than a minus sign drawn under the thin, drooping tip of her nose. Often the sign drooped too, as though something near her was distasteful to her, but more often she held it firm and straight against her teeth. When caught staring, Felix would look away at once, nervous, repelled, yet drawn to look again as soon as it seemed safe. One day he realised she reminded him of a praying mantis. A mantis had come into his room once in Baghdad and hung motionless all night on the curtain – a narrow insect, like a green stick, silent, shut up in itself. This likeness made her even more strange to him, almost monstrous, and she was the stranger for having a religion of her own. She told him nothing about this; she seemed to have forgotten her promise to tell him one day, she seemed for long stretches to forget him altogether.
    When she was not rushing off to the ‘Ever-Readies’ or giving an English lesson, she was, he could see, obsessed by the disagreement with Frau Leszno which was always carried on just out of his hearing. He was rather glad of this quarrel because it somehow made the two women seem more human – but it was a negative consolation. He wished he had something, anything, to