The Stranger's Child (38 page)

‘No, well, she has no qualifications,’ said Dorothy, with a slightly shifty look.

‘Ah, well . . .’ said Mike, now with a very heavy face. As far as Peter could make out only he and the Headmaster could boast university degrees, the others having various antique diplomas and in one case a medal. Neil McAll was the most exotic, with his Dip. Phys. Ed. (Kuala Lumpur), on the strength of which he taught History and French.

‘Well, she is the daughter of Captain Sir Dudley Valance, Bart,’ said Colonel Sprague, humorously but with feeling. Sprague himself, though only the bursar, showed a keen consciousness of long-erased ranks and sometimes assumed quite imaginary superiority over Captain Dawes and of course over Mike and the HM, who had both been in the RAF.

‘Well, that can’t have made for an easy upbringing,’ said Mike.

‘Corley Court was her childhood home.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ said the Headmaster, with a deplorably tactical air of vagueness, his eye wandering round the table, ‘but I was wondering if you might not best be able to have a word with her about all this . . . um,
Peter
.’

Peter coloured and blinked, and said at once, ‘With respect, Headmaster, I don’t think I can start disciplining other members of staff, especially if they’re twice my age.’

‘Poor Peter!’ said Dorothy, rustling protectively. ‘He’s only just got here.’

‘No, no, not disciplining . . . obviously!’ said the HM, flushing too. ‘I was thinking more of a . . . a subtle chat, a roundabout sort of conversation, that might be more effective than a dressing-down from me. I believe you play duets with her, or . . . ?’

‘Well . . .’ said Peter, almost guiltily startled that the Headmaster should know this. ‘Not really. We’re practising a couple of four-hand pieces we’re going to play for her mother’s seventieth birthday next week. I really don’t know her at all well.’

‘So it’s Lady Valance’s seventieth?’ said Colonel Sprague. ‘Pehaps the school should offer some form of congratulations.’

‘No, no, she’s not Lady Valance any more,’ said Peter quite sharply.

‘The present Lady Valance is about twenty-five, from the look of her,’ said Mike.

‘She was a model, wasn’t she,’ said Matron.

The fact was that Corinna Keeping frightened Peter, but he did feel he’d got somewhere with her. Some snobbish thing in her had picked him out, and believed it could impress him if not seduce him. He’d been to Oxford, loved music, had read her father’s books. Of course she played ten times as well as he did, but she never showed any desire to flick his ears. In fact she gave him cigarettes, and gossiped with him caustically about the running of the school. He probably was in a position to talk to her, but didn’t want to forgo her favour by doing so. He thought there would be interesting people at the party, and she had mentioned her clever son Julian, who had ‘gone off the rails’ in the Sixth Form at Oundle, and whom she too thought Peter might usefully have a chat with. ‘You probably are on the best footing with her,’ said John Dawes, with his air of drowsy impartiality. And Peter found himself saying,

‘Well, I’ll have a subtle chat, if you like.’

‘It would be best,’ said the Headmaster, stern now he’d won his point.

‘Though it may be far too subtle to do the trick,’ Peter said.

After this the talk moved to particular boys who were cause for comment of some kind, which passed Peter by as he dwelt regretfully on what he’d just agreed to. He started on a doodle of his own, in green ink, putting a pediment and pillars around the word Museum. It could be an Ashmolean after all. He wondered if Julian Keeping was attractive, and if there was anything queer about his going off the rails. In a public school the queer ones didn’t generally need to rebel, they fitted in beautifully; especially, of course, if they were beautiful themselves. He was surrounding the words Open Day in red stars when he heard the Headmaster say, ‘Now, Other Business, um, yes, now, Peter, all this pornography and what have you.’ In his slight confusion, Peter carried on doodling as he smiled and said,

‘I haven’t much to report, Headmaster.’ When he looked up he saw the strange preoccupied look around the table, a long slip of John Dawes’s pipe-smoke hanging and slowly dissolving between them.

‘Dorothy, I don’t know if you’d rather leave us?’

‘Good heavens, Headmaster’ – Dorothy shook her head, and then as if she’d forgotten something rummaged in her bag for a Polo.

‘I read
Dr No
, as requested,’ said Peter, pulling the confiscated book from under his papers. On the cover Ursula Andress’s right arm was half-obstructed by her bosom as she reached for the knife at her left hip. The belt seemed a bit kinky, worn with a bikini. On the back there was a quote from Ian Fleming: ‘I write for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, aeroplanes, and beds.’ Neil McAll reached over and turned the book to face him.

‘ “The world’s most beautiful woman”!’ he said. ‘I wonder.’ He angled the book for John Dawes to see. ‘Odd, low-slung chest she’s got.’

Old John, acutely embarrassed, appeared to study it. ‘Mm, has she?’ Peter tried to picture Gina McAll’s bosom; he supposed one judged a film-star and one’s wife by rather different standards.

‘The cover is much the . . . naughtiest thing about it,’ said Peter, ‘and since many of the boys will have seen the film I can’t think there’s any reason to worry about it. It’s actually not badly written.’ He looked around, frank-faced. ‘There’s a very good description of a diesel engine on page 91.’

‘Hmm . . .’ The Headmaster gave a wintry smile at this flippancy. ‘Very well. Thank you.’ Again Peter had the suspicion that to the HM he was a figure of advanced worldliness. ‘Since then, a search of the Fourth Form cupboard has produced . . . this’ – he felt in his jacket pocket, as if for some treasured handbook, and brought out a dog-eared paperback, which was passed round with very natural curiosity. It was Diana Dors’ autobiography,
Swingin’ Dors
: beneath her equally salient bosom on the cover ran the tag-line
I’ve been a naughty girl
. Mike had a good look at the photo inside of the Swindon-born actress in a mink bikini. ‘Absolute filth, of course,’ the Headmaster reminded them, ‘though I fear it now pales into insignificance. Matron, I’m sorry to say, has discovered the most revolting publications hidden behind the radiators in the Sixth Form.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Matron, her face rigid. Peter knew that these radiators were boxed in behind thick grilles, but presumably Matron tore those off as readily as she tossed the badly made beds in the air.

The Headmaster had the magazines in a folder behind him, which he pulled on to his lap and went through them under the table, mentioning the titles in a brusque murmur. They were all standard top-shelf fare, though
Health and Efficiency
was a bit different, having naked men and boys in it too. ‘Of course no one’s owned up to putting them there,’ he said, with a further flinch of disgust. Peter had a pretty good idea who it was, but had no intention of saying. It was all to be expected. ‘I think you were saying you’d heard some pretty putrid things being said, too, Matron?’

‘I have indeed,’ said Matron, but clearly she wasn’t going to elaborate. Whatever it might have been took on a phantom presence in the curious but baffled faces round the table.

Neil McAll said, ‘I know I’ve mentioned this before, but isn’t it time we gave them some sex education, at least in the Fifth and Sixth Form?’

‘Now as you know I’ve talked to the Governors about this, and they don’t think it’s desirable,’ said the Headmaster rather shiftily.

‘The parents don’t want it,’ said Matron, more implacably, ‘and nor do the boys.’ They frowned together like some intensely odd couple, and Peter couldn’t help wondering if either of them was entirely clear about the facts of life themselves. The older boys sometimes pictured them obscenely entwined, but he felt fairly sure that they were both virgins. Their stubbornness on the matter was certainly peculiar, in view of the long tradition of the confidential chat. And so the boys carried on into puberty, in a colourful muddle of hearsay and experiment, fed by the arousing pictures of tribal women in
National Geographic
and by dimly lubricious novels and artfully touched-up magazines.

After this as it happened Peter had a free period, when he was due to meet Corinna Keeping, an arrangement that now took on a certain charge. He doubted very much he would say anything. There was undeniable intimacy in the four-hand sessions with Corinna. Sharing her piano stool, he had a sense of the complete firmness of her person, her corseted side and hard bust, their hips rolling together as they reached and occasionally crossed on the keyboard. As the secondo player he did all the pedalling, but her legs sometimes jerked against his as if fighting the impulse to pedal herself. The contact was technical, of course, like that in sport, and not to be confused with other kinds of touching. None the less he felt she enjoyed it, she liked the businesslike rigour of its not being sexual as well as the unmentionable fraction by which it was. After a practice, Peter would find her mixed trace of smoke and lily-of-the-valley on his shirt. The meetings had no amorous interest for him at all, but he was naturally flirtatious and without really thinking he found they gave him a pleasant hold on someone generally considered a dragon.

She was waiting in the music-room, having just had Donaldson, who was doing Grade 7, for an hour. ‘Ah, well done, you’ve escaped,’ she said, with a mischievous jet of smoke, stubbing out her cigarette on the side of the tin waste-paper basket. ‘You got away from all those dear old bores.’

Peter merely grinned, took his jacket off and opened a window as if absent-mindedly. Far too soon to mention bullying, and though it had been on the tip of his tongue he saw clearly, now he was in her presence, that she would not be amused by an account of the pornography debate. He said, ‘Well, a lot of fuss about Open Day, as you can imagine.’

‘I suppose I can,’ she said, with a flick of her hard black eyebrows. ‘Of course I’m not asked to these highly important gatherings . . . I’m rather sorry you have to waste your time with them.’ It was her sly way of reaching to him over the heads of the other staff. Underneath it, he assumed, must lie wounded pride at coming back to teach music in the house she had lived in as a girl. Once he had asked her what the music-room had been in her day: the housekeeper’s bedroom, apparently, and the sick-bay next door the cook’s. ‘Have you looked at the Gerald Berners?’

‘I’ve looked at it long and hard,’ said Peter.

‘Rather dotty, isn’t it,’ said Corinna. ‘Mother will be thrilled, she adored Gerald.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve let me off the other two morceaux.’ It was just the simpler middle one they were doing, the so-called ‘Valse sentimentale’.

Corinna steadied the music on the stand. ‘Can you think of any other composers who were peers of the realm?’

‘What about . . . Lord Kitchener?’ Peter said.

‘Lord Kitchener? Now you’re being silly,’ said Corinna, and coloured slightly, but smiled too.

First of all they played straight through the piece. ‘I should just say,’ said Peter at the end, ‘that I assume it’s meant to sound as though I can’t play to save my life.’

‘Absolutely. You’ve really got it.’ With Corinna there was somehow a risk that one might revert to the age of eleven oneself, and get whacked round the head with a book. They went through it again, much more confidently, then she stood up for another cigarette.

‘Isn’t this main tune oddly familiar?’ Peter said.

‘Is it? I shouldn’t have thought any of Gerald’s stuff was familiar.’

‘No . . . I mean, I think he’s pinched it. It’s Ravel, isn’t it, it’s definitely French.’

‘Aha . . . ?’

Peter played the tune again, very plainly. ‘God, you’re right,’ said Corinna, ‘it’s the
Tombeau de Couperin
’ – and sitting back down she shunted him off the stool and played the Ravel, or a bit of it, with her cigarette between her teeth, like a pianist in a speakeasy.

‘There you are!’

‘Naughty old Gerald,’ said Peter, which was a liberty she allowed; though she then said,

‘It might just be naughty old Maurice, of course. You’ll have to check the dates. Anyway, we’d better look at the Mozart for ten minutes, then I must get back, I have to take my husband to the cricket club.’

‘Oh, in Stanford Lane?’ It was a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the bank. ‘I must say you spoil your husband.’

Though not cross, Corinna didn’t look pleased by this. She pushed the
Trois Morceaux
into her music-case, and then flattened the Mozart sonata on the stand. ‘I suppose you haven’t heard about him?’ she said.

‘Oh, no, I’m sorry . . . Has something happened?’ Peter saw him being knocked down in the Market Square.

‘Ah, you don’t know.’ She shook her head as if exonerating Peter, but still somewhat nettled. ‘People say it’s agoraphobia, but it’s not actually.’

‘Oh . . . ?’

She sat down again. ‘My husband had a very bad war,’ she said, with her little quiver of irritable tension. ‘It’s something that’s very hard for people to understand.’

‘I’m afraid I only met him for three minutes when I opened my account,’ said Peter. ‘He couldn’t have been nicer – even to someone who had more than forty-five pounds.’

‘He’s a brilliant man,’ said Corinna, ignoring this pleasantry, ‘he should be running a far more important branch, but he finds many things difficult that other people don’t.’