R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (58 page)

He stood breathing heavily beside the bed. The folly and incongruity of the long, smouldering quarrel settled about him like a cloud of marsh gas, poisoning his nostrils and drying out his mouth. For more than four years now they had been at it, just as Alderman Blunt had alleged, hammer and tongs, tit-for-tat, so that in the end they had arrived at a point where arbitrators had to be summoned to patch up a peace between two men charged with the education of four hundred boys, and both behaving like the youngest of them. Alcock's death, he supposed, in the very act of conceding defeat, would be seen as a great stroke of luck by some, but not by anyone who valued his self-respect. Victory, at this price, was a kind of defeat, and as he thought this he understood what had prompted him to slip that letter into his pocket. Everybody concerned was likely to accept it as the token of Alcock's surrender, Powlett-Jones' s legitimate prize as a trophy of war, and the prospect of this made him feel meaner and shabbier than ever, so that he put off thinking about it. He drew the spotless coverlet over Alcock's face and stole away, meeting Rigby on the stairs.

The butler said, in a hoarse whisper, 'I got him, sir. He's coming right over.'

For some reason the prospect of Willoughby arriving with his bag reminded him of Towser, snorting his life away in his basket, watched over by Grace. He said, 'Would you do something. Rigby? Pop up to my daughter, tell her I'm likely to be some time, and that she's to leave the dog and go to bed?'

'Yes, sir. Certainly, sir,' but he hesitated.

'Well?'

'About Mr Alcock, sir… I don't know as it's any of my business, but he had a sort of attack halfway through last term. It had been a very hot day, during that
long dry spell, sir. I found him gasping and a very bad colour in the parlour. He wasn't unconscious. He could tell me where he kept his pills, and I got him two, with a glass of water. They seemed to have a very strong effect, sir. He was himself again almost at once, and sharp enough to warn me to say nothing about it to anybody. It was some kind of tropical illness, according to him.'

'Thank you, Rigby. Do you remember where those pills are?'

'Yes, sir, He kept them in the small drawer of the sideboard. I took the liberty of getting them. Thought Dr Willoughby might want to see them,' and he handed over a small red pillbox, containing about a dozen yellow tablets the size of aspirins.

'That was very helpful of you, Rigby. Thank you again, and I'll pass them on. You can go up to bed if you want to, but if I were you I'd first help myself to a drink if Mr Alcock kept any about the place. If not use my whisky. My daughter will show you where it is.'

'Kind of you, sir,' and the courteous old chap shuffled off, letting himself into the quad and closing the heavy door with exaggerated care.

David went back into the study and re-read the letter, trying to decide whether or not to replace it where he found it but then Willoughby's car lights swept round the bend of the west drive, and he heard the car pass and stop, and Willoughby's brisk steps on the gravel.

He said, opening the door to him, 'Were you treating Alcock for anything, Doc? A tropical illness of some kind?' and Willoughby said he had never spoken more than a dozen sentences to him since he had come here and went quickly upstairs, with David behind him.

He made an examination, pausing to look attentively at the bluish lips. 'Tropical illness, my eye,' he said, 'It's angina, just as I suspected the moment Rigby told me. Had a feeling about the chap the first time I met him. You do about some people. Just a few and he was one of them. He held himself in, didn't he? Kept the lid screwed down in case it blew off at the wrong moment.'

'That's one way of putting it. Nobody could get close to him, but I never saw him lose his temper, not even when he was in a quiet fury, and he usually was when I had words with him.'

'It fits. Did he take anything?' and when David gave him the pills he glanced at them, then pocketed them. 'I'll hang on to these, P.J. There's a possibility of an inquest but it isn't likely. He's bound to have a medical record somewhere, and the bursar could look into it first thing. Will you notify his next-of-kin?'

'I haven't the faintest notion who his next-of-kin is, or even if he has one. The bursar might help there.'

'It'll keep until morning. Nothing more I can do. Bit of a shock for everyone. Lucky job you and Rigby had the sense to break in. I'll write the certificate downstairs.'

David said, when Willoughby had finished his writing, 'Do you notify the coroner or do we?'

'Me. He wasn't a patient but Bamfylde is. You'd better get on to the Governors tomorrow. As you were the one who found him they'll expect that.' Then, with a shrewd look, 'You didn't hit it off at all, did you? Not from the word go.'

'Nobody hit it off. It was all a ghastly mistake, due, in a way, to that idiotic quarrel between Carter and me four years ago.'

'What'll happen now, P.J.?'

'I'm damned if I know. We were both up before the Governors only this afternoon. He was alleging slackness and insubordination, so I got my oar in first. On Algy's advice, I might add. But if I had dreamed it could have led to this…'

'It didn't. Man's been living on borrowed time for years in my opinion. His papers should clarify that, unless he carried secrecy to the point of self-destruction, and I don't think he did. Too careful. Then there are these pills, they must have been supplied by somebody qualified. For God's sake, don't start reproaching yourself. You've no cause to at all.'

'Doctors don't know the lot. How about this?'

He took out the letter and passed it to Willoughby who read it slowly, then went back to read it a second time.

'He was writing this at the time?'

'It was on the desk.'

'I stick to my point. This fits too. Severe emotional strain, self induced, and I stress that, mind. You Celts and your damned guilt-complexes! Sometimes I think guilt is a Celtic sport, a variant of masturbation. All his life that chap has been driving himself, and in the last few years he's had his foot slammed down on the accelerator. Every man needs to blow his top now and again, especially a man in authority, but he never did, you say. Probably never so much as raised his voice. Well, this is the result, and it would have happened anywhere, anywhere at all, provided his job entailed responsibility.' When David made no reply he went on, 'Listen, P.J., he scared some of the others
off, but not you. You hung on, another Celtic characteristic. Well, who was right about that? Carter, who packed it in, or you, who stuck it for the sake of the place as a whole?'

'Was it worth a man's life?'

'Who knows? It might be, in the long run. You've got thirty years ahead of you. He had about one, I'd say. Let things drift awhile. Let the Governors and the bursar sort it out.'

He strode off, a big, bustling, hard case of a man, that nothing could rattle. David let himself out and went up to his quarters, passing through to the kitchen, his senses alerted by the silence reigning there. Towser was dead, curled in his basket and looking, somehow, as if he had died without much distress. He thought, 'Funny that. Two eras closed in an hour. The Old Guard's represented by Bat Ferguson, and Alcock's. Grace will be upset if she wasn't here when it happened, but I hope it was after Rigby sent her to bed.' He sat looking down at the basket, remembering the fire of eight years before, an ordeal that was much closer to the war, but in those days he had never shirked issues the way he was inclined to shirk them now. The older a man grew the less sure he was about anything. In the end, perhaps, he came face to face with the fact that he was still looking through a crack in a door, wondering at the things he saw within. What had Alcock's fifty-odd years taught him about handling people? Or Howarth's? Or Barnaby's? They were all amateurs at the game, himself included. He wondered whether to ring Chris again but decided against it. She had enough on her plate at the moment and the new situation wouldn't do anything to aid her concentration. There seemed even less point in rousting out Howarth or Barnaby at two o'clock in the morning. Technically Howarth was senior master, and would be saddled with the job of making the announcement at morning parade. Suddenly he felt drained of energy, too confused and dispirited to devote a single thought as to where Alcock was likely to be buried, and whether or not his funeral would rank as a Bamfylde ceremony. He reeled off to bed and within minutes, against all expectation, he was asleep.

1

A
LCOCK WAS NOT BURIED AT STONE CROSS, BESIDE SUCH classroom warriors as Judy Cordwainer and Bat Ferguson. His London lawyers had received specific instructions concerning his disposal. He was to be cremated, and his ashes conveyed to Cape Town.

He had a family after all, two sons, both living abroad, but the bursar dealt with the family and the lawyers. All David was required to do was to write a detailed report of what had occurred, sending one copy to the Governors, another to Dr Willoughby, who took it upon himself to superintend the medical aspects, notwithstanding the fact that Alcock had never been his patient. There was no inquest. It emerged, in a matter of hours, that Alcock had been under a London heart specialist, a man of repute, according to Willoughby. 'He couldn't have given the chap very good advice,' Willoughby said, 'or maybe he did and it was ignored. I thought you might like to know that I was right in my spot diagnosis. He left Africa for health reasons, and I suppose that accounts, to some extent, for him concealing it so successfully. They wouldn't have appointed him if it had got about he was a heart risk.'

It was queer, David thought, how rapidly and completely Alcock had effaced himself. He had seemed so brooding a presence but now, in a matter of days, there was hardly a trace of him, if one excepted the new bog and his other renovations, like the donkey's breakfast floor coverings in the dormitories, and the revarnished pew-backs at Stone Cross Church. He appeared as a brief visitation. No more and no less. Algy Herries, four years absent, was a far more active ghost, and it was Algy who came to their rescue, slipping back as acting-head until the end of the term and spending four days a week at the school. He did not live in but motored home to his parish every night, so that
it was not like having Algy actually restored to them but rather helping out, like Rawson, the honorary football coach, now on four months' leave from Rhodesia.

David heard nothing from the Governors concerning a replacement. They would delay it, he imagined, until the new year. There was no immediate hurry, with Algy on the doorstep, and when Brigadier Cooper rang, hinting at a renewed application, he steered him away from the subject. It was something he preferred not to think about for the time being. Willoughby had kept that letter but what use he had made of it, if any, David had no idea. He was aware of the effects of shock in the days that followed, and this in itself was strange, in view of the hundreds of deaths he had witnessed, and all the corpses he had handled between 1914 and 1917. The others, Grace included, found him very subdued, and there was the minimum of conversation on the subject in the common room. It was as though Alcock, who had divided them in life, continued to isolate them in death. Only Howarth spoke out, growling to David, as they stood watching the hearse drive off, 'That's that, and I hope to God nobody asks me to comment. If there's one form of hypocrisy I can't tolerate it's sentimental regard for the dead, simply because they
are
dead. To hear some people talk at a funeral one would suppose dying was limited to the chosen few.'

As it happened, however, there was a funeral at Bamfylde that same week. Towser was buried on the edge of the planty by David and Grace, just beyond the bank where the first of the trees grew. Grace marked the spot with two white stones and it was not until two days later that Coxe Minor presented himself at David's door, asking, very politely, if he might have a word with his housemaster.

Coxe was a fresh-faced thirteen-year-old, lumbering his way through Lower School. A dreamy, inoffensive little chap, no good at games or work but with a consuming passion for wild life that made him, while still in the Upper Third, Bamfylde's authority on ornithology.

Coxe was said to run a kind of birds' hospital up in the planty, a hedge-hide where he collected not merely birds but stoats, weasels and other creatures, all reputably charmed by his various whistles and calls. One of his owls, wounded in some affray, had been nursed back to health in a hut down at the piggeries and later set free. Barnaby christened him Frankie, after St. Francis, as soon as this story got about and the name stuck. David, inviting him inside, asked, 'What's bothering you, Coxe?' and Coxe said he was there to make a request
on behalf of himself and Davidson. Davidson, a local farmer's son, was his special crony, also serving time in the Upper Third.

'It's about Towser, sir. Davidson is hot stuff at carpentry and he's made a headstone – well,
headboard
. He asked me if he should and I told him to go ahead, seeing that Grace's dog had been about the place so long, sir. I've got it outside, and I wondered if she could tell us where Towser is buried, so as we could put it up, and whether it would be right to do it, sir.'

Without waiting for reassurance, he slipped outside, reappearing almost at once with a board about two feet by one foot, shaped to a gothic apex, and with a smoothly planed oblong enclosed within deeply scored lines. The lettering on the oblong was neat and clear:
Towser Powlett-Jones, died Sept. 30, 1931, aged about twelve. R.I.P.

He saw it not as a tribute to Towser but as a graceful compliment to Grace, who was popular with everyone about the place. Each of them, apparently, thought of Towser as Grace's dog, not his, or something inherited from the Fergusons. He said, 'I think that's very kind of you and Davidson, Coxe. Do thank him for me. Take the board to the planty, and I'll send Grace along to show you exactly where to put it.' He paused, pondering a moment. 'It's a pity you didn't add something about the fire we had here. Towser saved us all by waking me up. We always had a very special regard for him on that account.'