The Stranger's Child (37 page)

Paul closed his eyes in a heavy-hearted dream of bachelor flats, his gaze slowly making out, among the pools of lamplight, the shared sofa, the muddled slippers, the advanced pictures, opening the door on to the bathroom, where he himself was shaving as Peter Rowe, now looking oddly like Geoff Viner, lolled in the bath, reading, smoking and washing his hair all at the same time, then opening, through a sort of purple vapour, the door of the bedroom, on to a shadowy scene more thrilling and scandalous than anything described in
Films and Filming
– in fact a scene that, as far as he knew, had never been described at all.

Peter sat in the Museum, writing up the labels with his four-coloured biro. ‘Whose is the sword, again?’

‘Oh, the sword, sir? Brookson’s, sir,’ said Milsom 1, coming over and watching intently for a moment.

‘He claims it was his grandfather’s, sir,’ said Dupont.

‘Admiral’s Dress Sword,’ Peter wrote, in black, and then, flicking to red, ‘Lent by Giles Brookson, Form 4’. He felt the boys themselves ought really to do the labels, but they had a thing about his handwriting. Already he saw his Greek
e
, his looped
d
, his big scrolly
B
, seeping through the school, infecting the print-like hand they had hitherto based on the Headmaster’s. It was funny, and flattering in a way, but of course habitual; ten years before, he had copied those
B
s from a favourite master of his own. ‘Voilà!’

‘Merci, monsieur!’ said Milsom, and took the card over to the display cabinet, where the more precious and dangerous exhibits were to be housed. There was a lovely set of Indian clay figures in the dress of different ranks and trades – military piper, water-seller, chokidar – very trustingly lent by Newman’s aunt. The shelf above was home to a hand-grenade, it was assumed unarmed, a flintlock pistol, Brookson’s grandfather’s sword, and a Gurkha kukri knife, which Dupont had taken down and was working on now with a wad of Duraglit. He and Milsom were talking about their favourite words.

‘I think I’d have to say,’ said Milsom, ‘that my favourite word is
glorious
.’

‘Not
gorgeous
?’ said Dupont.

‘No, no, I far prefer
glorious
.’

‘Ah well . . .’ said Dupont.

‘All right, what’s yours? And don’t don’t
don’t
say, you know . . . sort of
pig
, or
and
. . . or, you know . . .’

Dupont merely raised an eyebrow at this. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘my favourite word would have to be
Churrigueresque
.’ Milsom gasped and shook his head and Dupont glanced at Peter for a second to judge the effect of his announcement. ‘But on the other hand,’ he went on airily, ‘perhaps it’s just something very simple like
lithe
.’

‘Lithe?’

‘Lithe,’ said Dupont, waving the kukri sinuously in the air. ‘Just one little syllable, but you’ll find it takes as long to say it as glorious, which has three. Lithe . . .
lithe
. . .’

‘For god’s sake be careful with that weapon, won’t you. It’s designed for chopping chaps’ heads off.’

‘I am being careful, sir,’ said Dupont, wounded into a blush. Since his removal from the music-room he’d been slightly wary of Peter, and seemed not to trust his own voice, with its weird octave leaps in the middle of a word. In a minute Peter came and looked over his shoulder at the wide blade: it was the angle in the middle that made the back of his thighs prickle.

‘It’s a vicious-looking thing, Nigel . . .’

‘Indeed it is, sir!’ said Dupont, with a grateful glance. Strictly speaking, only prefects were addressed by their first names. He turned the kukri over, one side gleaming steel, the other a still dimly shiny blue-black. His fingers themselves were black from the wadding. ‘It’s perfectly balanced, you see, sir.’ He held it tremblingly upright, one stained finger in the notch at the foot of the blade. It swung there, like a parrot on a perch.

There were a number of pictures to be hung, and Peter asked the boys where they should go. It was their Museum – surely Dupont’s idea, but loyally co-authored with Milsom 1; Peebles and one or two others were involved but had melted away once the hard work of cleaning out the stable and whitewashing the walls had begun. It was clear they just wanted to play with the exhibits. ‘Let’s hang the Headmaster’s mother,’ said Peter, and saw the boys giggle and look at each other. He held up a gloomy canvas in a shiny gilt frame. ‘Very generous of the Headmaster to lend this, I feel, don’t you?’ They all gazed at it in the state of comic uncertainty that Peter liked to create. A round-faced woman in a grey dress peered out as if in suppressed anxiety at having produced the Headmaster. ‘Where shall we put the late Mrs Watson?’ Horses had clearly been thought to need little light – just the half-door at the front, and one small window high up at the back. The overhead bulb in a tin shade left the upper walls in shadow. ‘Right up at the top, perhaps . . . ?’

‘Does that mean she’s dead, sir?’ said Milsom.

‘Alas, yes,’ said Peter, with a certain firmness. There were some things they shouldn’t be encouraged to joke about – though her death was surely the reason she’d been unhooked at last from the Headmaster’s sitting-room wall.

‘We do need more lights, sir,’ said Dupont. He had ideas of using the Victorian oil-lamp lent by Hethersedge, but this was a hazard even Peter had drawn the line at.

‘I know we do – I’ll have a word with Mr Sands about it.’

‘I feel we should put her in a prominent position, sir,’ said Milsom.

Peter smiled down at him, with a moment’s conjecture about what lay ahead in life for such a respectful boy. ‘I feel you’re right,’ he said, and climbed up to fix the old girl on the wall above the weapons cabinet. It was a central spot, though it turned out the edge of the lampshade threw everything above her chin into deep shadow. ‘Ah, well,’ said Peter, rather imposing on the boys his own belief that it didn’t matter. They went to get on with their work, glancing up at her doubtfully from time to time.

Peter opened a cardboard box and picked out the framed photograph of Cecil Valance, huffed and then spat discreetly on the glass, and gave it a vigorous wipe with his handkerchief. Inside, between the glass and the mount, were many tiny black specks of harvesters, which had got in there and died perhaps decades ago. ‘Where shall we hang our handsome poet?’ he said. ‘Our very own bard . . .’

‘Oh, sir . . .’ said Milsom; and Dupont dropped the kukri and came over.

‘Shall we put him here, sir, right above the desk?’ he said.

‘We could, couldn’t we?’ The desk itself was an exhibit – part of a jumble of Victorian furniture and household objects, clothes-baskets, clothes-horses, coal-scuttles, that had been roughly stacked and locked away in the adjacent stable at some unknown date. It was immensely heavy, with two rows of Gothic pigeon-holes, and oak battlements, now rather gap-toothed, running along the top.

‘Do you think Cecil Valance might actually have written his poetry at this desk, sir?’ said Milsom.

‘I bet he did, sir,’ said Dupont.

‘Well, I suppose it’s possible . . .’ said Peter. ‘The early ones, perhaps – as you know, he wrote the later ones in France.’

‘In the trenches, sir, of course.’

‘That’s right. Though the handy thing about poems is you can write them wherever you happen to be.’ Peter had been doing some of Valance’s work with the Fifth Form – not just the famous anthology pieces but other things from the
Collected Poems
that he’d found in the library, with the Stokes memoir. The boys had been tickled to read poems about their own school, and young enough not to see without prompting how bad most of them were.

Dupont was looking closely at the photograph. ‘Can we say when it was taken, sir?’

‘Tricky, isn’t it?’ There was just the gilt stamp of Elliott and Fry, Baker Street, on the blue-grey mount. Little evidence in the clothes – dark striped suit, wing-collar, soft silk tie with a gemmed tie-pin. He was in half-profile, looking down to the left. Dark wavy hair oiled back but springing up at the brow in a temperamental crest. Eyes of uncertain colour, large and slightly bulbous. Peter had called him handsome, not quite knowing what he meant. If you thought of Rupert Brooke, say, then Valance looked beady and hawkish; if you thought of Sean Connery or Elvis, he looked inbred, antique, a glinting specimen of a breed you rarely saw today. ‘He died very young, so he’s probably’ – Peter didn’t say ‘about my age’ – ‘in his early twenties.’ Strange to think, if he’d lived, he’d have been the same age as Peter’s grandfather, who still played a round of golf a week, and loved jazz, if not quite ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

‘Was he ever married, sir?’ asked Milsom earnestly.

‘I don’t believe he was,’ said Peter, ‘no . . .’ And climbing on to the desk he asked the boys to pass him the hammer, and drove a nail into the whitewashed wall.

At the staff-meeting in the Headmaster’s sitting-room, the talk this week was all about Open Day. ‘So we’ll have the First XI against Templers, starting at 1.30. What’s the lookout there?’

‘A walkover, Headmaster,’ said Neil McAll.

The Headmaster smiled at him keenly for a moment, almost enviously. ‘Well done.’

‘Well, Templers are a pretty feeble side,’ said McAll drily, but not refusing the praise. ‘And I’d like to take a couple of extra nets this week, after prep . . . ? Just to knock them into shape.’ The Headmaster seemed ready to grant him anything. Peter glanced at McAll across the table, with uncertain feelings. Black-haired, blue-eyed, dressed in sports kit at improbable times of day, he was adored by many of the boys, and instinctively avoided by others. He breathed competition. In his two years at Corley Court, he was credited with dragging the school up from its long-term resting-place at the bottom of the Kennet League.

‘Clean whites, of course, Matron?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Matron; ‘though by tenth week . . .’

‘Well, see what you can do, will you.’

‘I’m bringing the seniors’ bath night forward to Thursday,’ said Matron, with an air of great strategy.

‘Mm? Oh, I see, quite right,’ said the HM, frowning over a slight blush. He consulted his list. ‘Any other activities . . . ? Now, I see I have the Museum.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Peter, surprised at how nervous the HM made him, the whole half-watchful, half-indifferent gathering of the staff. He looked across at John Dawes, the most avuncular of the masters, flicking his lighter for the third or fourth time over the bowl of his pipe; and Mike Rawlins beside him, deep in the systematic doodle with which each week he obliterated the roneoed order of business. They’d been sitting at these meetings for twenty years. ‘Yes, I think we’ll have something to show by Open Day. They’ve got some interesting things together, as well as some rather silly things. It won’t be, you know, the Ashmolean . . .’ – Peter grinned and looked down.

‘No, well,’ said the Headmaster, who resented his Oxford allusions.

‘I’m assuming the place is locked securely at night?’ said Colonel Sprague. ‘As I understand it, it contains various items lent by parents?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Peter. ‘Dupont is officially the curator, and he gets the key off me.’

‘We don’t want any trouble of that kind,’ said the Colonel.

‘I must try to get down and see it,’ said Dorothy Dawes, as if it would require a certain amount of planning. She taught the ‘Babies’ in the First Form, and seemed set apart from the rest of the school in a nest of knitting-wool and gummed paper. She was always equipped with two treats, Polos and Rolos, which she handed out liberally to reward and console. It wasn’t clear to Peter if the Daweses had had children of their own.

‘I’ve lent them a couple of things myself,’ said the Headmaster. ‘A portrait and a set of antlers. Just to get them started.’

‘No, much appreciated,’ said Peter solemnly. ‘And we’ve also got a few interesting items from the Valances’ days.’

‘Ah, yes . . .’ said the Headmaster, a wary look coming over him. ‘Now this leads me to a somewhat delicate matter, which I must ask you to keep very much to yourselves.’ Peter assumed they’d got to the sex part, and was suddenly doubting the witty remarks he’d been planning to make about
Dr No
and Ursula Andress’s bust. ‘Well, you know already, John, and . . . It’s to do with Mrs Keeping.’

There was obviously something thrilling about this, since Mrs Keeping was such a hard nut and not at all popular with the other staff; a ripely responsible look settled over them.

‘I’ve had a few, shall we say, comments before, but now Mrs Garfitt has written to complain. She claims Mrs Keeping has been hitting young Garfitt with a book, I’m not quite clear where, and also –’ the Headmaster peered at his notes, ‘ “flicking his ears as a punishment for playing wrong notes”.’

‘God, is that all,’ murmured John Dawes, and Matron gave a short illusionless laugh. ‘Not that it will do any good.’

‘I’ve told Mrs Garfitt that judicious corporal punishment is one of the things that keep a school like Corley Court ticking over. But I’m not quite happy about it, all the same.’

‘The trouble is she doesn’t consider herself to be a schoolteacher,’ said Mike Rawlins, without losing the track of his doodle.