Rupert’s visit to Longleat that year was unsettling, more like what he’d been expecting from Cambridge. He had been at Longleat just after World War II, when no one had money or servants or heating or meat or electricity. What had survived the war were the titles and bloodlines, the great houses and families. Rupert had felt his disinheritance and dispossession; there were other orphans, war orphans, but they knew their fathers’ names. By the end of his first week, he knew where he stood in the social rankings. As a scholar and the ward of an Anglican minister, his status was just respectable. An earl’s son, thick as a post, might stumble his way through Longleat on his way to Teddy Hall without a hint of self-doubt troubling his sleep. Rupert saw that he would have to succeed. Longleat was an indelible lesson on money and class. England in 1946 was not far removed from Trollope. A gentleman might inherit money, spend money, borrow money, marry money; he would not work for money. He would take up a profession, one of a limited number—the bar, the church, government and politics, the Army or Navy, public school or university teaching. Salary never determined his choice. City men worked for money; so did Americans, unabashedly, unapologetically. Rupert determined to go where the money was to be made.
Rupert stopped in at the Headmaster’s Office to introduce himself. He didn’t want to be discovered lurking on the grounds by a porter and taken for a pervert or stalker. In his day, the school had been down-at-heel but beautiful, with its ancient stone buildings, some going back to the fourteenth century, and its swaths of green lawn. Now it was only beautiful. Rupert had not been happy at Longleat; he’d been lucky. Seeing the place again reminded him again of the great debt owed his guardian. As a very young man, he hadn’t acknowledged all that Reverend Falkes had done for him. He was only twenty when the reverend died, too young to bear thinking of himself as a charity case. If I’d had to be grateful, he thought, I would have been deformed by it. At twenty, Rupert had wanted to think the reverend didn’t expect his gratitude or even desire it, but only looked to him to fulfill his early promise. Thirty-five years on, he felt sadness and regret, even as he absolved his younger self. All the unasked questions, the ones he had avoided, came with a rush: Why did he pick me out of the dust heap? Why do I have his name? What did I owe him? Did I thank him? Did he know I…? Rupert stanched the flow. The words “loved him” hung in the air. Rupert walked toward the chapel, Lear’s curse ringing in his ears: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.” Evensong would start at five thirty. Rupert gave up God early, about the time Eleanor gave up Santa Claus, but he held to the Anglican rituals, his inheritance. God save the Queen, God help the poor.
When Harry was thirteen, he asked his parents whether he should go to boarding schools. They were all at dinner. Friends of his wanted to go away, to Andover, Exeter, Milton. “What do you think?” he asked his parents and brothers. Rupert was, to everyone’s surprise, against it. “Boarding schools are for orphans,” he said. “Children who have parents should stay home until university.”
The boys stared at their father. He had never before said anything to them so revealing. No one said anything.
Later that evening when they were alone, Eleanor followed up with Rupert.
“What is your grievance against boarding schools?” she said.
“They’re sexual cesspits, like prisons,” he said.
Eleanor stared at him. “What happened?” she said.
“You don’t want him to go away. Do you want him to go away?” Rupert said.
Eleanor reached out and touched his cheek. “No,” she said, dropping her query, knowing she’d never get an answer. “I am still attached to him. And I’m not finished with him.” She paused. “Neither are his brothers. He can’t leave home until one of them takes him down a peg. I’m betting on Sam. The others haven’t the stomach for it.” She was too optimistic. To her frustration and admiration, Harry resisted all takedowns, bouncing back like a punching bag. As he forgave his own trespasses, he mostly forgave others theirs, never offering a proper apology, never expecting one.
“I underestimated him, his resilience, his self-confidence, his willed blindness,” she said to Rupert years later. “Where did he get that from?”
“My side,” Rupert said.
“It’s my mother, isn’t it?” Eleanor said. “Or maybe my father.”
Rupert invited Will to go with him to Chichester. “We’ll walk around. No knocking on doors.” Rupert knew no one from his St. Pancras days. He had left the orphanage at seven, when he went to the Prebendal, and he had never returned to it. During holidays, he stayed in the rectory, in a small room in the staff quarters. The church was still there, looking like its old flint self on the outside but so much smaller than Rupert remembered. Inside, the changes distressed him. Renovations in the early 1980s—adding on a large recreation room, replacing the pews with chairs, taking down the altar—gave the sanctuary the look of a middle school auditorium. “It’s Low Church, practically Methodist,” Rupert said to Will. “Father Falkes wore a cassock. I used to wonder if he had grown up a Catholic and changed the spelling of his name, dropping the w, adding the l, when he took Anglican orders. I think he would have liked to shrive his parishioners. He would have hated the guitars.” The orphanage was now the Parish Hall. A brochure said it had closed in 1958. “Father started it during the Depression,” Rupert said, “after several infants had been left on the steps of the church. I don’t know what happened to the girls.”
“Did you ever think about your parents?” Will asked.
“No, not then,” Rupert said. “When your whole world as a small boy is made up of orphans, you think you’re normal. When I went off to the Prebendal, Father explained that the children there would likely have parents, a mother and father. ‘Tell them what you want,’ he said. ‘Don’t lie if you can help it.’ I said I had been orphaned. I hated the word ‘orphan.’ I don’t know why Father Falkes singled me out. He wasn’t my father. I’ve read Great Expectations.”
“What was it like to be at a boarding school at seven?” Will asked. “You were so little.”
“Being an orphan provided me with an early advantage,” Rupert said. “I didn’t miss my mother. ‘How come you don’t cry?’ a classmate asked. I told him I never cried. This was true.” He laughed. “Another child asked me why I called my dad ‘Father Falkes’ and not Daddy, or Papà or even plain Father. ‘Your parents must be very polite people,’ he said. I said, ‘Yes, Father Falkes is very polite. Very proper too. I haven’t got a mother.’ I looked down as if I were sad. I almost said ‘My mother is dead.’ That might have been a lie.”
“Were you ever interested in looking for your parents or their children?” Will asked. “Their other children?”
“No,” Rupert said. “Sometimes I imagine being contacted by a lost relation. ‘Rupert, how are you, old man? Sorry we had to give you up. Depression.’ That sort of thing. The thought fills me with suspicion and rage. What could any one of them be now but a cadger.”
“I’m sorry,” Will said.
“No, don’t be,” Rupert said. “Coming to America, I felt cast into Eden. I can’t imagine that any brothers or sisters I might have had are better off than I. I’m not talking about money, though it plays its part. I’m talking about Father Falkes, Cambridge, your mother, you five, Granddad, Yale, my work, West Sixty-Seventh Street, our life. I’ve no illusions about my origins. No family romance. Gypsies didn’t kidnap me. I’m not a Fitzroy or a Moses. I was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”