18

“IT’S GOING TO BE PUBLISHED,” AGNES LAURA RYERSON said, defiantly pleased. “By the Free Presbytery of Glasgow. Their Annual Report on Public Questions, Religions, and Morals. Do you mind if I read a point or two aloud to you?”

“Oh, please do,” Joyce said icily.

Mortimer hastily freshened his drink.

“All must be prostrated,” Miss Ryerson read, “before the great Hedonistic Juggernaut; this has been the year of the Parliamentary campaign to stamp the foul brand of Sodom upon the nation’s brow and it has been the year of Parliamentary activity to have the future of our island race in part decided in the broiler-house minds of eugenists and abortionists; it has been the year of the meeting of Canterbury and Rome and it will be too much to hope that it will be abortive.” Miss Ryerson paused; she looked over the rims of her glasses to see if Mortimer and Joyce were being attentive. “The quality of our culture is signalised by the fact that the accolades of royal recognition are given to maestros of moronic music. What this represents is cultural cretinism –”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Miss Ryerson,” Mortimer interrupted, “but I’m afraid we really must run.”

“Oh, didn’t you know?” Joyce asked, beaming. “Miss Ryerson is coming with us.”

“What?”

“I’ve already invited her.”

Mortimer refilled his glass and promptly drained it. “We’re going to be late,” he said gloomily.

And they were. Excuse me, beg your pardon, Mortimer muttered, leading Joyce and Agnes Laura Ryerson to their seats in the Beatrice Webb auditorium, which was gaily tricked out with reams of colored ribbons, balloons, and mistletoe, for the Christmas play. A rosy-cheeked boy skipped across the stage waving a placard which read PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM. He was followed by a giggly, plump ten-year-old girl with another placard: DIALOGUE THE FOURTH.

Mortimer focused on the stage, where four nude ten-year-olds (two boys, two girls) were frolicking on an enormous bed. The effect was comic, making Mortimer recall an old Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell, which had shown a freckled little girl sitting at her mother’s dressing table, the gap between her teeth showing as she puckered her lips to try on her mother’s lipstick.

The boy playing Dolmance said, “I see but one way to terminate this ridiculous ceremony: look here, Chevalier, we are educating this pretty girl, we are teaching her all a little girl of her age should know and, the better to instruct her, we join – we join – we join –”

“Some practice to theory,” the prompter hissed.

“– some practice to theory. She must have a tableau dressed for her: it must feature a prick –”

“Louder, please,” a parent behind Mortimer called out.

“– a prick discharging, that’s where presently we are; would you like to serve as a model?”

Le Chevalier de Mirvel, played by a big black West Indian boy, whom the audience desperately wanted to do well, responded, biting back his laughter, “Surely, the proposal is too flattering to refuse, and Mademoiselle has the charms that will quickly guarantee the desired lesson’s effects.”

Madame de Saint-Ange, a gawky child, all ribs and knees it seemed, squealed, “Then let’s go on: to work!”

Which was when they fell to wrestling on the bed, le Chevalier de Mirvel, to judge by his laughter, being the most ticklish of the four.

“Oh, indeed,” Eugénie hollered, “ ’tis too much; you abuse my inexperience to such a degree …”

The West Indian boy kissed Eugénie.

“Smack, smack,” Dolmance called out, for Miss Tanner had encouraged them to improvise.

“Here comes the mushy stuff,” Madame de Saint-Ange pitched in, alienating herself from her part. She was, after all, only playing Madame de Saint-Ange. For real, as Miss Tanner had explained, she was Judy Faversham.

“Oh, God!” the West Indian boy hollered. “What fresh, what sweet attractions!”

Agnes Laura Ryerson’s face went the color of ashes. Behind Mortimer, a man demanded gruffly of his wife, “When does Gerald come on stage?”

“Quiet, James.”

Yet another father voiced his displeasure. “There aren’t enough parts.”

“It’s a classic, Cyril.”

“All the same, it’s a school play. There should be more parts. It’s jolly unfair to the other children.”

Mortimer’s attention was gripped by the free-for-all on stage. Puzzling over the nude, goose-pimply children entwined on the bed, he wondered, le Chevalier de Mirvel aside, which leg, what rib cage, belonged to whom. Dolmance squealed, “I have seen girls younger than this sustain still more massy pricks: with courage and patience life’s greatest obstacles are surmounted –”

“Here come the clichés,” the man behind Mortimer said, groaning.

“ ’Tis madness to think one must have a child deflowered by only very small pricks. I hold the contrary view, that a virgin should be delivered to none but the vastest engines to be had …”

Suddenly the stage lights dimmed and the bed was abandoned to le Chevalier de Mirvel and Eugénie. Secondary lights brightened and behind the free-floating gauze that formed the rear bedroom wall there magically loomed the boys and girls of the second form, Doug’s form, cupids as it were, humming a nervy, bouncy tune and carrying flickering, star-shaped lights. There was enthusiastic applause and only one harsh cry of “Derivative!” from the man behind Mortimer, as the kids filed on stage and formed a circle round the bed, where le Chevalier de Mirvel and Eugénie still tussled. Then, taking the audience completely by surprise, a fairy godmother, wearing a tall pointed hat, all sparkly and wound round and round in shimmering blue chiffon, was suspended in midair over the bed. The fairy godmother was none other than Mr. Yasha Krashinsky, who taught Expressive Movement at Beatrice Webb House.

Deafening applause greeted the rotund, dangling Yasha Krashinsky, a touching measure of support, as it was widely known that he had soon to appear at the Old Bailey, charged with importuning outside Covent Garden. While the second-form choir hummed, Yasha Krashinsky chanted, “Le Chevalier de Mirvel is wilting. Our fair Eugénie is fading fast. They will only make it, grown-ups, if you believe in the cure-all powers of the orgasm. Grown-ups, do you believe in the orgasm?”

“Yes!”

The pitch of the humming heightened. Yasha Krashinsky chanted, “The young virgin and her lover cannot hear you. Louder, grown-ups. Do you believe in the orgasm?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Blackness on stage. The throbbing of drums. Squeals from the bed. One of the boys from the second-form choir took a step forward, raised his arms aloft, and shouted: “Hip! Hip!”

“Hurrah!” returned the choir.

“Hip! Hip!”

“Hurrah!”

A spotlight picked out the fairy godmother, Yasha Krashinsky, as he was lowered with a clunk on stage; and poured a flask of red paint into a bucket.

“Now she is a woman” the choir sang to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance.” “Eugénie’s a woman now.”

Once the play was done, the children skipped off to the dining hall, where choc-ices, a conjurer, and a Popeye cartoon show awaited them. The adults remained in the auditorium, where they were served vin rosé and cheese squares. Dr. Booker, Yasha Krashinsky, and finally Miss Lilian Tanner, mounted the stage to shouts of “Bravo,” and the meeting was called to order. Mortimer was immensely encouraged to discover that he was not alone in being rather put off by the Beatrice Webb House production of Philosophy in the Bedroom. He was in a minority, a reactionary minority, but he was not alone. As the meeting progressed beyond niceties, Mortimer was heartened to see other parents come to the boil. The play was not the issue. It was, however, symptomatic of what some parents felt had come to ail the school.

Francis Wharton, the enlightened TV producer, began by saying he had always voted Socialist; he deplored censorship in any shape or form, on either side of the so-called Iron Curtain; Victorian double standards were anathema to him; but all the same he thought it a bit much that just because his thirteen-year-old daughter was the only girl in the fifth form to stop at petting –

“Shame,” somebody called out.

– heavy petting –

The objector shrugged, unimpressed.

– was no reason for her to come home with a scarlet T for “tease” painted on her bosom.

This brought Lady Gillian Horsham, the Oxfam organizer, to her feet. Lady Horsham wished for more colored neighbors in Lowndes Square. She had, she said, found the play on the twee side here and there, but, on balance, most imaginative.

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Booker interrupted bitingly, “but?”

Lady Horsham explained that her daughter, also in the fifth form, but not so cripplingly inhibited as the previous speaker’s child –

“Hear! Hear!”

– had already been to the London Clinic to be fitted with a diaphragm.

“That’s the stuff!” “Good girl!”

But, she continued, but, wasn’t it all rather premature? Not, mind you, that she was a prude. But, as they were all socialists, it seemed to her irresponsible that while their sisters in Africa and India were in such desperate need of diaphragms –

“Not germane,” somebody hollered.

Yes, it was germane, Lady Horsham continued. But look at it another way, if you must. Parents were already overburdened with spiraling fees, the cost of summer and winter uniforms, hockey sticks, cricket bats, and what not. Was it fair that they should now also have to fork out for new diaphragms each term as, let’s face it, these were growing girls? Couldn’t the girls of the fifth form, without psychological damage –

“Your question, please?”

– without risk, practice coitus interruptus? “Spoilsport!”

“Reactionary!”

Dr. Booker beamed at his people, gesturing for silence. “If I may make a positive point, there is no reason why the tuck shop co-op, which already sells uniforms the girls have outgrown to younger students, could not also dispose of diaphragms that have begun to pinch, so long as the transaction was not tarnished by the profit motive.”

Next to speak up, Tony Latham, the outspoken Labour backbencher, explained that while it certainly did not trouble him personally that his boy masturbated daily, immediately following the Little Fibber Bra commercials on ITV, it was quite another matter when his parents, up from the country, were visiting. Latham’s parents, it was necessary to understand, were the product of a more inhibited, censorious age: it distressed them, rather, to see their only grandchild playing with himself on the carpet, while they were taking tea.

“Your question, Mr. Latham?”

Could it be put to Yasha Krashinsky, overworked as he is, that he keep the boys for five minutes after Expressive Movement class, and have them masturbate before they come home?

“But I do,” Yasha put in touchily. “I do, my dear chap.”

Other, more uncompromisingly radical parents now demanded their say. There could be no backsliding at Beatrice Webb House. “You begin,” a lady said, “by forbidding masturbation in certain rooms or outside prescribed hours and next thing you know the children, our children, are driven back into locked toilets to seek their pleasure, and still worse have developed a sense of guilt about auto-stimulation.”

“Or,” another mother said, looking directly at Lady Horsham, “you allow one greedy-guts in the fourth form to hold on to her precious little hymen and next thing out goes fucking in the afternoon.”

There followed a long and heated discussion on the play, its larger meanings within meanings, and then a debate on Beatrice Webb House finances, co-op shares, and needs and plans for the future, if – as Dr. Booker put it, winding up to a standing ovation – LBJ was going to allow us a future. Some compromises were grudgingly agreed to. Diaphragms, for instance, would be made optional until a girl reached the sixth form. On the other hand, Dr. Booker absolutely refused to stream girls into classes of those who did and those who didn’t. It would be heartless, he said feelingly, to stamp a girl of twelve frigid for the rest of her life. Some, if not all, late developers might grow up to surpass seemingly more avid girls in sexual appetite. “Thursday’s heavy petter, properly encouraged,” he said, “might develop into Friday’s nympho.”

Mortimer, and three other hard-core reactionaries managed to take over the interview-and-appointments committee. There were, at the moment, two teaching vacancies, one in the second form, Doug’s form.

“That’s for me,” Miss Ryerson said.

England needs me. “Oh, my God, no, Miss Ryerson. I couldn’t.”

“You must.”

“But –”

“Don’t you worry about Agnes Laura Ryerson. I’ll show them a thing or two.”

“Yes, Miss Ryerson.”