R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (39 page)

Both had accepted Barnaby's invitation to partake of 'real' coffee in his quarters, at Nicolson's on a day that school ended at eleven a.m., in honour of the match with the Devonshire Dumplings. Barnaby, a ritual coffee-maker, scowled down at the common room brew and said, 'With important visitors about the place other ranks can be moderately sure of a bubble-and-squeak lunch. Come and fortify yourselves. Everyone invited.'

Irvine and Howarth had joined them, and all five sat around talking shop before Carter raised the subject that was in everybody's mind.

'What do you make of this chap, Alcock? Oughtn't we to begin trimming our sails?' An innocent-enough remark one would have thought, hardly calling for Howarth's testy, 'Trimming is more in your line than mine, Carter!' whereupon, anxious to demonstrate that their peace treaty was more than a gesture, David said, 'No, Howarth. Carter's right. We ought to have sized him up by now, he's been mooching about the place ever since he was appointed. Has anyone exchanged more than a word with him?'

Nobody had, not even Carter who, as they all recalled, had been the first to congratulate the incoming head. Irvine said, with an uncharacteristic touch of malice, 'He's been living with Algy. P.J. is the only one with a direct line to the Gaffer. Hasn't the Old Man leaked anything to his protégé, Davy?'

'He hinted that Alcock was short on humour. Nothing more. I'd say he was a pedant, and will act like one until the place takes him over,' whereupon Carter said, flatly, 'It'll never do that, old man. Never!'

He sounded so emphatic that Barnaby raised an eyebrow. 'What makes you so sure of that? It managed to mellow everyone here, didn't it? Not much but somewhat. Even Howarth,' but then rendered the gibe harmless by winking very solemnly and refilling Howarth's cup.

'Call it a hunch,' said Carter and then, with a nod at Barnaby, that might or might not have been an acknowledgment of his hospitality, he slammed down his cup and stalked out.

'Hallo, hallo, hallo? What brought that on?'

This, from Irvine, whereupon Howarth growled, 'Pique. Plain, unadulterated pique. The little man has been given the cold shoulder and wants us to restore circulation.'

It was not often that David ran counter to Howarth and never had on Carter's behalf. He said, carefully, 'You might as well know, all three of you, that Carter and I have settled our account.'

'You might have settled yours, my friend,' Howarth said sourly, 'but don't bank on Carter paying up. You should have learned by now that common room feuds never heal. Invariably they fester.'

'Well, this one won't,' David said, and went on to give an account of his meeting with Carter in the library annexe on the first day of the Governors' meeting. 'As for Carter being the first to shake hands with Alcock, why read
anything into that? I'd have done it myself if I'd thought of it. My impression is Alcock is difficult to classify.'

Howarth yawned, indicating that the subject bored him, but it was one of these infelicitous occasions when everyone makes the wrong remark at the wrong moment. Irvine, always baffled by abstracts, said, 'Tell you something else. There'll be no more bonus free periods like today's, for cricket or rugger. Man isn't interested in games. Probably never played anything but croquet in his whole life.'

'That raises him a notch in my estimation,' said Howarth, and went out before Irvine could protest, and although Howarth's contempt for games was a long-established school joke, David could see that the bull-necked Irvine, whose tireless coaching had made Bamfylde the most formidable school side in the West, was upset.

He said nothing, however, but followed Howarth out, so that David had an uncomfortable suspicion that the arrival of Alcock might mean a reshuffling of common room alliances. For a moment he was tempted to explore this thought with Barnaby but thought better of it, remembering that Barnaby made a point of never quarrelling with anyone and would explain why when he could find anyone to listen. Trudging across the moor on one of their hikes he had once said, 'A man can't teach Horace and Cicero all day and fall to bickering between times. It's all been said before, P.J. A long, long time ago.'

He continued to think about it from time to time, however, inclined to dismiss the notion that a stranger, not yet in office, could introduce new tensions into the place, and yet, it did occur to him, as the last weeks of term ran out, that the Lent tight-rope was making an unseasonal appearance in high summer. It could only be, he reasoned, the impending departure of Algy, whom everybody liked, and most of them revered. Halfway through the head's farewell speech he changed his mind again.

Algy was not rated high as a speechmaker, an after-dinner speaker that is, where the neatly turned phrase, and the gilded platitude, is almost obligatory. He was, however, a breezy chatter-up and today, somewhat to everybody's surprise, he excelled himself. He seemed, almost, to be voicing stray thoughts and deductions rather than saying his official goodbyes, and acknowledging the gift of silver tableware, inscribed with his name and dates. Instead of addressing himself to a rambling tour of something over sixty years of Bamfylde history (a speech that everyone present felt his due) he preferred to present a potted
raison d'être
of the profession, illustrating his theme with all manner of sly jokes
at the expense of boys, staff, Governing Body and himself. Mostly himself, for Algy appreciated a joke against himself above all others.

'…Occasions like these are free gifts to the professional windbag… I could keep you here until rising bell, telling you Bamfylde stories, most of which would qualify as thrice-baked chestnuts… Things I have seen and experienced, since I came here as a scared little toad of eleven. By Christopher, I
was
scared too, now that I think of it! Oblige me by passing that on to the smallest and scruffiest of your September intake, Mr Alcock. Who knows? It might cheer him up a bit.'

But Alcock, legs neatly crossed, arms carefully folded, did not so much as blink.

'…I could spin yarns of long ago, when anyone with more than six mistakes in Sunday dictation was flogged by that brute Wesker. God, in His supreme mercy, endowed me with an ability to spell. But I was caught on “rhododendron” and had them rooted out when I came here as head. I could spin yarns of Wesker's time and yarns of the day before yesterday, when I overheard something to my advantage while seated on Mount Olympus, otherwise known as Spyglass Hill…'

For half a minute he paused to allow the laughter to subside. Almost alone, among those crowding the hall as far as the kitchen hatches, Alcock was ignorant of the fact that Mount Olympus, otherwise known as Spyglass Hill, was not to be found on any local ordnance map but was the head's privy, with its stained-glass Judas window, opening on to the quad. The man could be forgiven, perhaps, for looking bewildered at the immoderate reception accorded this innocent-sounding remark but not, David thought, for withholding a token smile when Algy went on to say that he overheard one boy tell another how he managed to gouge ten shillings from his father to add his name to the farewell gift subscribers' list. 'He then contributed a mere five and was gracefully complimented by the head boy for his extreme generosity.

'No matter…' and here Algy picked up the silver teapot, lifted its lid and glanced inside, '…I wouldn't like to give anyone the impression that I'm complaining. It is indeed a very handsome reminder of my twenty-three years here as headmaster, and the subscriber in question – no names, no penal drill – can always salve his conscience by slipping across the parish boundary on the first Sunday of Michaelmas term and dropping the missing coins into my offertory plate.'

Not a muscle of Alcock's face twitched. He might, David thought, have
been listening to a lecture on bimetallism, so that Carter's remark – what was it? – the man's inability to identify with Bamfylde, suddenly had relevance, and the laughter, renewed and prolonged had no power to cheer.

He had missed a quip or two by then but Algy was now ambling towards his climax, with his audience silent again as he tried to explain what he saw, what he had always seen, as the true function of a headmaster. 'It isn't an instructor. Any reasonably staffed school should have plenty of trained instructors on hand. And it isn't an administrator, either, or never has been in my case. Anyone here will tell you that, judged on my paperwork alone, I wouldn't qualify for a remove every other year. No, no, I've seen myself, latterly at all events, as a kind of co-ordinator of all the aims and impulses that keep a place like Bamfylde alive and useful. Education, in the generally accepted sense of the word, has never rated very high on my list of priorities. All that the best of us can do is to teach boys how to educate themselves between their time of leaving here, and their time of crossing that Rubicon, that comes, for most of us, at about twenty-five, when the memory sponge is getting soggy and we tend to read and forget.

'I've had plenty of first-class scholars through my hands since 1904, but I can't claim much credit for their academic successes. They would have been achieved at any school, given the same material. But helping to equip two generations of predatory males with the qualities of patience, tolerance, good fellowship and the ability to see someone else's point of view – qualities I see as the keystones of democracy – that's something else. I'll pipe down now – did I catch a gusty sigh of relief from the back? But let me close with a final anecdote, one that came to mind when I was riffling through the Old Boys' register this morning, in search of inspiration for this interminable valediction.

'It was a very trivial incident but it must have impressed me at the time. Why else should it have stayed in the mind for nearly twenty years? It concerned two boys, Petherick and 'Chuff' Rodgers, who accompanied me over to Barcombe by train, when we were giving a charity performance of that year's opera. It was Christmas time, of course, and the train was very full. We finally secured seats in a compartment where a young woman was nursing a baby. Within minutes of starting out the baby was dramatically sick… I remember poor Petherick's expression well, as he took refuge behind my copy of
The Times
. Upside down it was, but a thing like that wouldn't bother Petherick. He was one of our sky rockets, and went on to become president of a famous
insurance company, and collect the O.B.E., or whatever they give the cream of insurance brokers. But I wasn't thinking so much of Petherick but of Chuff. Always unlucky, he had been sitting alongside the mother, and was thus on the receiving end of the business. I didn't know what to do but Chuff did. He whipped out a handkerchief – the only clean handkerchief I'd ever seen him sport – leaned across, wiped the baby's face and then the mother's lap. And when I say “wiped” I mean wiped. It wasn't a dab. It was more of a general tidy-up, all round. After that we had a tolerably uneventful journey, with Rodgers making soothing noises all the way to the junction.

'Now some of you might think that is a very damp squib to conclude the regular fireworks display we have had here tonight, with so many kind speeches, and the giving of such splendid farewell gifts, but it isn't, you know. It's very relevant, to me at any rate, relevant to what we've all been engaged in up here on the moor all these years. For Chuff Rodgers, bless his thick skull, never won a prize or a race in his life. Neither did he find time to do the only thing he was equipped to do – raise a family. He was killed at First Ypres, but I still remember him. Rather better than I remember Petherick. As a matter of fact, when I came across his name this morning, I thought of him as one of our outstanding successes.'

He may have intended saying more but nobody gave him the chance. After a dithering moment he sat down and reached for the beaker of water. Because the story was so typical of Algy it touched an emotional spring in his audience that could only find surface in applause of the magnitude no one had ever heard in the Big Hall. David, joining in, forgot to notice if the armour of Alcock's implacability had been dented but then, suddenly remembering him, he glanced that way again, and was momentarily certain that Chuff Rodgers's handkerchief had achieved what all Algy's jokes and nudges had failed to achieve. Very deliberately Alcock unfolded his arms, uncrossed his legs and bent towards the floor. It was only when he straightened up that David realised he had been fooled. Alcock's head came up like a stork's, neatly and tidily, as he replaced the table napkin that had fallen when Algy lifted the water beaker. His long fingers busied themselves straightening the creases and then, as he refolded his arms, his expressionless eyes resumed their neutral scrutiny of the middle distance.

David thought, with an inward qualm; 'Carter was right. He'll never identify,' and wondered what the near future had in store for everyone cheering the tubby little man in the centre of the stage.

2

Before half-term he had acquired a variety of nicknames. It was held at Bamfylde that a nickname, even when the bestowal was derisory, none the less implied absorption into the family. Alcock was the exception to this rule. The very nature of his nicknames signified his separateness, rare even for an instant failure, or a boy or master who had never rated a nickname.

Howarth, the one member of the staff who did not appear to be rattled by the man's remoteness, called him The Mandarin. Barnaby, paying his usual tribute to the classics, called him The Stoic. 'A Stoic of the woods, a man without a tear,' he quoted, and there was something stoical about Alcock's detachment, as though he had set himself a task that absorbed the last dregs of his nervous energy, leaving absolutely nothing to spare on the units of the school as people rather than pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to be contemplated from above and ultimately, one hoped, allotted their proper place in his neat, tidy mind. Always, they came to realise, his mind. Never his heart, providing he had one under the trim alpaca waistcoats he wore.

He had been widowed, it was said, many years ago in Africa, but no one could be sure of this or, indeed, of anything out of his past. Alcock's personal life was double-padlocked against them all. His degrees, which were impressive, and his educational achievements in the Dominions, were there for all to see. Beyond this nothing. Nothing at all, so that communication with him, from the first day of his first term, was reduced to a kind of sign language. 'Of the kind,' jested Barnaby, 'that a cautious trader might use to barter with a native despot of unbelievable taciturnity.'