Tom told Mr Pemberton that he was. Mr Pemberton nodded and said he hoped he and Nigel were getting along, and Tom said, yes, of course, Nigel was extremely pleasant to work with.
This was absolutely true as far as it went: Nigel had never been remotely unpleasant to him, always nodded to him in the morning and said goodnight to him at night and occasionally commented on the weather; that was about it. Tom put this down initially to the fact that he was indeed rather in awe of Nigel who was older than him and had been to university. At Pemberton & Marchant, he was the heir apparent – Basil Marchant had only daughters. Nevertheless, they were the youngest people in the office by a country mile, as Betty would say, and it would have been good to make a real pal of him. Tom once tried, suggesting they went to the cinema together when the much-vaunted film Lost Horizon came to Hilchester, but Nigel said he was busy on Saturday night.
‘Doesn’t have to be Saturday,’ Tom said. ‘Friday, maybe, or if it arrives Thursday we could go then.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Nigel. ‘Not really my bag.’
Tom shrugged, tried again once with a different film, and then gave up.
They had really nothing in common apart from their work. Nigel was a keen golf player, went on holiday to places like Eastbourne and Cornwall with a crowd of friends, and from time to time up to London. Tom would learn of these activities through Nigel’s answers to Betty’s questions. She was insatiably curious about both boys’ leisure activities and Nigel didn’t seem to regard this with anything but good-natured amusement. It was as if he came from another country, speaking another language and with terms of reference Tom couldn’t understand. It puzzled him at first, but gradually it dawned on him: he was from a totally different class. The Pembertons lived in a big house on the outskirts of Hilchester, with a family car and servants; and apart from the cachet of having been to university, Nigel had also gone to public school. He had an easy confidence bordering on arrogance, simply by virtue of this, or so it seemed to Tom. He occasionally, very politely, asked about life at the grammar school and seemed surprised when he was told some pupils went to university.
Some of the differences were created purely by money: Nigel could afford to belong to the local tennis and golf clubs, to go to concerts and the theatre, and he and his father were often to be heard discussing some book or other they had bought, rather than borrowed from the library. Money – Nigel’s possession of it, his own lack of it, and the difference that must make – Tom could understand.
Class, that was different. Apart from the Southcotts, the village grandees, as his father called them contemptuously, were clearly from another world so alien it might have been Mars. It hadn’t occurred to him that some perfectly ordinary people, going about their business, whatever that might be, might consider themselves superior to other perfectly ordinary people, purely by virtue of what their fathers did and, to a degree, how they spoke. Tom was aware that the grammar school had taught him to speak differently from his parents, but that had been a result of hearing what was called Received Pronunciation all day long. He had made no conscious effort to change his accent, and would have been astounded if anyone had suggested he might. Having become aware of the class thing, Tom became first irritated, then annoyed, and finally slightly disturbed by it. It seemed genuinely regrettable to him, this yawning chasm between him and someone of his own age, doing the same job. For the first time he properly understood his father’s hostility to his own tacit ambitions of leaving his class behind.
The other yawning gap between him and Nigel was their clothes. Nigel had at least three winter suits and three summer ones and many ties. Tom knew it was absurd to care, but he couldn’t help it, and as his cheap work suit grew shiny on the seat and his two ties increasingly worn, he became acutely self-conscious about the whole thing and asked Isobel for money for clothes when she enquired what he would like for Christmas. Isobel realised what the problem was, having risen in the social firmament herself, and duly provided the wherewithal for several ties and a pair of new shoes, offering to take him shopping for a new suit when it was his birthday.
In the office, Tom was rather lonely, despite loving the work; he missed the camaraderie of school, the genuine sense of friendship and shared endeavour that had constituted life there. He did see some of his old friends at the weekends, but they too were divided. The cleverest had gone to university – one to the unimaginable heights of Oxford – and others into their father’s businesses, some to do quite menial jobs or to work on farms.
But Tom had very little money to spend; apart from taking Angela to the cinema, he could only manage occasional nights at the King’s Head in West Hilton with his mates. And his father kept him busy at the weekends, demanding rather than requesting his assistance with the endless tasks in the house and garden; it was his way of reminding Tom where he belonged, and maintaining his own dignity against the fact that his eldest son was marking out a path so different from his own.
Mary was inordinately proud of him and never stopped talking about how well he was doing; but Jack’s primary emotion on the subject seemed closer to distaste. Tom found this, as he said to Angela, hurtful. Angela, surprisingly sensitive over such matters, kissed him and told him Jack was probably just jealous, which Tom conceded. But he would still have greatly preferred his father to speak as proudly of him as he did of his brothers, Colin and Arthur, who were both apprenticed to local builders.
Chapter 3
1938
‘Michael’s asked if he can bring someone called Edward Welles down this weekend.’ Lady Southcott smiled at Diana across the breakfast table. ‘He’s a new friend from the medical school at Barts. I don’t know anything more about him, except that we are to call him Ned and his father’s a famous surgeon. But I’m sure he’s very nice – Michael’s friends always are.’
This was a bit of a sweeping statement, Diana thought, and quite untrue. Some of them were ghastly, loud, blustering and over-confident, but anything would be better than the stultifying boredom of another weekend alone with her parents.
Michael had finished his three years at Oxford and gained an Upper Second in his first MB; he was now at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London to do his clinical training. He loved it and was extremely happy.