R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (43 page)

'Yes, sir.'

'Would you mind telling us all what prompted you to laugh?'

'I… er… couldn't help it, sir.'

'I see. You couldn't help it. That is
all
you have to say?'

'Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir.'

'I'm glad to hear it. You're a prefect, I believe.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Next term, under normal circumstances, you would have become head boy of the school?'

'Well… yes, sir.'

'You are no longer a prefect, Hoskins. Prefects are expected to co-operate with the headmaster in the maintenance of discipline. That is all. You may dismiss.'

They rose as Alcock descended the two steps to floor level and swept out. There was no point in anybody making the least attempt to stifle the loud buzz that followed his exit. Everyone, masters as well as boys, contributed to
it, and the only two present who had nothing to say were Carter and Monk. The first sat beside the radiator looking stunned. The other moved closer to the desk and looked down at the small heap of debris in the tray. The rest of the staff moved out in a body, turning, by common consent, into the quad where Maxton, the third official bell-ringer David could recall, was already swinging his handbell for prep.

Barnaby said, 'I like to think we have just witnessed the compulsive act of a throwback. That was almost an exact reproduction of a medieval book-burning, the kind of thing Tyndale might have been called upon to witness before being burned at the stake. Interesting, don't you think?'

'No, I don't,' snarled Rapper Gibbs. 'It was the silliest piece of cheap melodrama I've ever had to witness. The man is a complete ass.'

'Howarth doesn't agree,' David said. 'You don't, do you, Howarth?'

'Not entirely,' said Howarth, ostentatiously lighting a Gold Flake, and inhaling deeply. 'You don't have to like him in order to concede his originality.'

But Gibbs had drifted off, and Barnaby began to elaborate his throwback theory, so David turned back towards Big School and was just in time to see Monk cross the quad with Carter. The housemaster's gait was jerky and in the half-light it looked almost as if Monk was assisting him. He hurried across and caught them as they were mounting the steps to Outram's and Monk, turning aside, said, 'Mr Carter told me, sir. I'd like to say thank you, if I may.'

'It was your housemaster's idea, Monk. I didn't have much confidence in it.' And then, 'For God's sake, man, stay well clear of the head until the end of next term. I wouldn't like to see that little scene repeated would you?'

'No sir,' said the Stoker, seriously, 'it was a very good pipe, sir,' and David felt a tide of profound irritation rising in him, not merely with Alcock but with youth and youth's ability to slough off emotional involvement in all manner of things, not merely an idiotic pipe-smashing ceremony but the stupidity of the entire human race. It was a very disquieting sensation, carrying him all the way back to a time when boys not much older than Monk were exchanging facetious jokes within minutes of walking into a curtain of shell-fire. He said, curtly, 'Cut off, Monk, and try and stay out of trouble,' and as the boy withdrew he glanced through the open door of Outram's, wondering whether he should go in and console Carter. He decided against it. The episode was finished and already, he supposed, absorbed into Bamfylde legend, to be passed from generation to generation until it became apocryphal with Alcock portrayed as a mountebank, chasing Monk up and down Big School with a hammer
in one hand and a gaudy pipe in the other.

He climbed the stairs to his own quarters, wondering how Grace would take the summary demotion of Hoskins, perhaps the only one among them with a true sense of proportion, and was not surprised to see Sax awaiting him on the threshold, holding a record in its cardboard sleeve. Sax said, cheerily, 'Evening, sir. I was on the list as duty perk to take prep, but as I'm reduced to ranks that'll be out, won't it? The head does like us to keep to the letter of the law, doesn't he?'

'I believe he does, Hoskins,' David said, and suddenly felt immensely grateful to the boy. He thought, 'Maybe we can all learn something from him,' and said, 'Is that a record for Grace?'

'Yes, sir, came this morning by post. A peaches and creamy number, sir – “Carolina Moon". Good rhythm, tho'. Harry Roy's orchestra, playing “Button up your Overcoat” on the reverse side. Would you give it to her, sir?'

'Give it to her yourself,' he heard himself say, 'we all need a bit of cheering up, Sax.' And then, as they went in, he called to Grace that Hoskins was here. 'Did anyone else laugh, Sax?'

'No, sir. They were all too concerned for poor old Stoker. I think it rattled 'em a little, sir.'

'It obviously didn't rattle you.'

'No, sir. To be honest, it just struck me as… well… the funniest thing I had ever seen happen here. I mean, walloping away at poor old Stoker's pipe with a hammer, and that bit of stage-dressing – Potter coming in bang on cue, with the tray. I don't mind about the demotion, sir. In a way it was worth it. I mean, you could wait around a long time before you saw anything as funny as that.'

The near-despair he had experienced a few minutes ago turned itself inside out, so that now he saw youth's resilience as a miraculous restorative, capable of reducing everything to a laugh. He thought, 'That's how it's been from the very beginning, since the day I first came here, looking and feeling a total wreck. Self-pity was out from the moment Algy collared that boy on the way in from the playing fields… Who was it again? I remember, Daffy Jones, with news of a last-minute recovery by Nicolson's. And then Nipper Shawe appeared, swinging that bell, and I felt… renewed somehow. I hope to God that's how it'll always be, with someone like Sax Hoskins around to remind us that nothing matters much. Except the ability to laugh at ourselves now and again.'

Grace had dashed out of her room, welcoming an opportunity to abandon
her homework, and in a moment they had the record turning. Sax was right about 'Carolina Moon'. It was a peaches and creamy number, but soothing to the nerves in an odd sort of way. He smiled across at them and went into his study, closing the door on Alcock and all his works.

1

H
E SAW IT, THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF that year, as a cross-country ride on a half-broken mount, a succession of jolts, swerves, slitherings and punishing jog-trots, interspersed, every now and again, with a head-on collision, incidents like the lavatory notice row, and the last-minute reprieve of Stoker Monk.

Looking back on his ten years under Algy, his life seemed, in retrospect, to have been unbelievably smooth, even allowing for occasions like the Havelock's dormitory fire, the Carter feud, Winterbourne's disappearance, and his own personal tragedy. Now, with the staff divided and distrustful, the boys bored and bemused, and everyone isolated from the methods and policies Alcock adopted, he was more often out of the saddle than in it, usually, he would have said, just about holding on in hope that some dramatic improvement was around the corner. And yet, for all his misgivings, he never thought seriously of throwing in the sponge and leaving Bamfylde to run itself into the ground.

The summer up here had always been especially welcome after the frost, wind and rain of the Lent term. Year after year the weather was predictable in May and June, although it sometimes deteriorated towards the end of the term. It seemed settled enough now, after their reassembly in late April, and he made a resolve to enjoy it in spite of Alcock, immersing himself in his day-to-day schedule, and dividing his spare time between work on 'The Royal Tigress', and excursions beyond the school boundaries, where he could put the school out of mind.

But then, confronting him in much the same way as the two previous eruptions, the Hislop crisis loomed up and within a few weeks of that the certainty of Carter's withdrawal and almost total isolation and after that towards the end
of the succeeding Michaelmas term, an uncompromising declaration of war, that could only end in outright victory for one man or the other.

Hislop was the leader of The Lump, a cadre now trapped in that traditional repository of rascals, the Lower Fourth, where one always looked for the originals and (providing one was lucky and patient) promise of better things to come once the natural leaders had moved to the Fifth. Boyer, Winterbourne and Sax Hoskins had been of this ilk, incorrigible at fifteen and sixteen, but worth their weight in gold once they had sobered down and been given responsibility.

Hislop was a boy who could go one way or the other; towards a modest fulfilment, or to perdition, like Ruby Bickford, now, it was said, spending his father's money in the Argentine, and living the life of Old Reilly according to ill-spelled letters to former contemporaries.

Hislop's father was a publican, a heavy, florid man, with a sharp little wife, said to bully him unmercifully. Hislop got up to all the usual pranks, including the placing of a plaster cast of Aphrodite in Barnaby's bed when he was absent, then spreading a rumour that there was a corpse on the premises. He had averaged, in Algy's time, about one hiding a week, but he never minded that, viewing authority, and authority's visitations, much as the old lag regards arrest and an occasional stretch in gaol. It was this attitude in mind, of which David and other old hands were well aware, that made his admission so surprising. One would have thought that, given the circumstances, he would have swallowed his loss, and gone about his business, without taking a course that was bound to lead to one hell of a row.

Havelock's had been troubled, of late, by an outbreak of petty thieving, not unique in David's experience, for once or twice, in Algy's day, there had been trouble of the same kind. Small, personal items had disappeared from lockers, rarely anything of value but enough to promote an orgy of padlocking, enquiry and surveillance, involving domestic staff as well as boys. Then, one day towards the end of May, Hislop presented himself at the door of David's study and reported the theft of twelve pounds, fifteen shillings.

It was the size of the haul that staggered David and he questioned Hislop closely as regards the source of money that had been stolen, according to Hislop, from a bedroom slipper kept in the laundry basket that lived under every boy's bed.

He said, appalled, 'Nearly thirteen pounds? Taken from a slipper in the senior dorm? But that's ridiculous, Hislop. Apart from having that much money, what on earth possessed you to hide it in a slipper?'

'I thought it would be safer there than in my locker sir. Anyone can open those padlocks on the dormitory lockers. Gage's was opened a week ago and a fountain pen stolen.'

'I know all about Gage's fountain pen. He reported it at the time. But that was worth five shillings. What were you doing with twelve pounds, fifteen, anyway?'

Hislop looked evasive. Unlike most of The Lump he had never been a good liar and David's experience told him at once that he was hoping to gloss over the source of the money.

'Well? You'll have to tell me now you're here.'

'It was from my aunt,' Hislop said. 'She was going to live abroad and gave my Guv'nor fifteen pounds for me when he came over for Sports Day. I was supposed to bank it in my Post Office account but I didn't. I spent some on a binge at Ma Midden's, and was saving the rest towards a motorbike.'

'And you were daft enough, knowing that there was a thief around, to hide it in your slipper?'

'Yes, sir. I see now it was crazy but it seemed a good idea at the time. I thought he wouldn't be likely to look there, among stuff awaiting to be collected for the wash. I stuffed it into the toe and kept it there with a ball of newspaper. It was there last night, sir, and it couldn't have gone during the night.'

'Why not?'

'Because I put the slipper under my mattress and took it out again in the morning. I didn't check then but I'm certain it was still there.'

'And then?'

'I nipped up during break to get five bob to blue at the tuckshop. The ball of newspaper was still in the toe but the money was gone.'

'Well, that seems to be that. Unless you have any bright ideas.'

'I know who took it, sir.'

'You
what?'

'It was Cricklade. That new chap, who cleans up in Havelock's.'

'You saw him take it?'

'No, I didn't see him, sir, but I've got proof. I asked around, and Trubshawe,
in the kitchen, said Cricklade was the only one who had been up there since breakfast. So I… well… took a chance, sir.'

'You challenged him?'

'No, sir. I knew that wouldn't do any good. I got Gower to tip him to go into the village for cigarettes. While he was gone Gage and I went through his room, sir.'

'My God, that was a risky thing to do. Did you find the money?'

'Thirty bob of it, sir. He must have the rest on him. We found Gage's pen, too, sir, and Harper's postal order that he hadn't cashed.'

'Apart from the postal order and the pen how do you know his thirty bob was part of your money?'

'It was three ten-bob notes, sir. One had been ripped across and stuck with transparent paper. Another had an ink blotch on it, shaped a bit like a thistle. I know they were two of mine, sir, but… well, I would have kept mum about it if it hadn't been for the postal order.'