The Stranger's Child (44 page)

‘Oh, I know,’ said Peter, pleased by this and glancing at Paul, who was half-turned away from him, as if abashed by his own remark.

‘I’ll be interested to see the tomb.’

‘Oh, well, of course, that too,’ said Peter.

Outside the town a dusty breeze blew off the wheat-fields through the open windows, and mixed with the smell that he knew was slightly sickening of hot plastic and motor oil. In the noisy bluster of air perhaps they didn’t need to say very much; he explained about the imminent Open Day, the cricket match and the new Museum, but without feeling Paul took it in; and then: ‘Well, here we are’ – the line of woods was approaching, and he hoped Paul saw, far back from the main road, the flèche on the chapel sticking up among the trees. Here was the lodge-house, a diminutive foretaste of the mansion itself, a cluster of red gables, with a corner turret and a spirelet of its own. The huge wrought-iron gates stood perpetually open. And what Peter always thought a lovely thing happened. As he slowed and changed down and turned off into the chestnut-shadowed drive they seemed to slip the noose of the world, they entered a peculiar secret – in the rear-view mirror, quickly dwindling, the cars and lorries still rushed past the gateway; in a moment they could no longer be heard. There was a magical mood, made out of privilege and play-acting, laid over some truer childhood memory, the involuntary dread of returning to school – Peter tested and even heightened his own feelings by peeping for them in the face of this new friend he barely knew, and yet suspected he knew better than anyone had before. On their right, through the wide strip of woodland, the playing-fields could be glimpsed, the thatched black shed of the cricket pavilion. ‘These woods are out of bounds, by the way,’ he said. ‘If you spot a boy in there you can give him the hairbrush.’

‘The hairbrush . . .’

‘On the BTM.’

‘Oh,’ said Paul after a moment. ‘Oh, I see. Well, let’s have a look for one later,’ and blushed again at the surprise of what he’d said. Peter laughed and glanced at him, and thought he had never met a grown man so easily and transparently embarrassed by anything remotely risqué. He was a hot little bundle of repressed emotions and ideas – perhaps this was what made the thought of sex with him (which he planned to have in the next hour or two) almost experimentally exciting. Though what colour he would turn then . . . ‘Now, here we are.’ There had been some talk about Corley at Corinna’s party, but Peter hadn’t told him what to expect. He slowed again at the second set of gate-piers, and there suddenly it was. ‘Voilà!’

Some form of stifling good manners, or perhaps mere self-absorption, seemed to keep Paul from seeing the house at all. Peter let his own smile fade as they trundled across the gravel sweep and came to a halt outside the Fourth Form windows, the sashes up and down to let in air, and the curious heads of boys doing prep turning to look out. The indescribable atmosphere of school routine and all the furtive energies beneath it seemed to hang in the air, in the jar and scrape of a chair on the floor, the inaudible question, the raised voice telling them all to get on with their work.

In the front hall Peter said quietly, ‘I’m sure you’re dying for a drink.’ In his room he had plenty of gin and an unopened bottle of Noilly Prat.

‘Oh . . . thank you,’ said Paul, but wandered off round the hall table to gaze with unexpected interest at the Honours Boards. On the two black panels scholarships and exhibitions to obscure public schools were recorded in gold capitals. There were annoying variations in the size and angle of the lettering.

‘You notice D. L. Kitson?’

‘Oh, yes . . . ?’

‘Donald Kitson . . . No? Anyway, he’s an actor. The school’s main claim to fame.’ There were squeaky footsteps behind them, on the polished oak of the stairs, the Headmaster’s crepe soles. He came towards them with his usual air of having leapt to a conclusion – this time, perhaps, a favourable one.

‘Ah, Peter, good. Praising our famous men.’ He must have seen the car return, the stranger come in.

‘Headmaster, this is my friend Paul Bryant – Paul . . .’ – and he rather mumbled the HM’s name, as if it were either confidential or unnecessary. He had the keenest sense yet of breaking the rules.

‘Well, welcome to Corley Court,’ said the Headmaster, standing with them to look at the Honours Boards. ‘I rather fear after this term we’re going to be in need of a new board.’ It was in fact notable that the frequency had picked up, after a hopeless five years, 1959 to ’64, in which there were no honours at all. ‘Peter’s working wonders with the Sixth Form,’ the Headmaster said, almost as if speaking to a parent. It was possible of course that he’d seen him in the bank, and was trying to place him.

‘Is it all right if I show Paul round a bit, Headmaster?’

The HM seemed to welcome the idea. ‘Keep out of prep, if you can. You’ll want to see the chapel. And the library. Actually,’ he said, with a glance at the window, practical and proprietary, as if regretting he couldn’t join them, ‘it’s not a bad evening for a hike round the Park.’

‘There’s a thought,’ said Peter, with a deadpan stare at Paul.

‘Get out on the Upper Tads! Get into the woods! What . . . !’

‘Well, we could . . .’ The old fool seemed to be chasing them into each other’s arms.

‘Now, I’m just going to check on the repairs,’ he said, moving away towards the door of the Fifth Form.

‘Well, I rather want Paul to see that too, if that’s all right,’ said Peter.

‘Most unfortunate, just before our Open Day,’ the HM continued in a confidential tone to Paul. He opened the left half of the double door and peered in in his brusquely suspicious way. ‘Well, they’ve made some progress’ – allowing Paul and Peter to follow him into the room, where instead of the bowed heads of boys doing prep they found the tables pushed back against the walls, sacks of rubble, and at the far end, above an improvised scaffold of ladders and planks, a large ragged hole in the ceiling. There was a smell of damp, and a layer of gritty dust over every surface. During Musical Appreciation on Tuesday evening, Matron’s bath had overflowed, the water finding its way down through the old ceiling beneath, where it must have built up for a while above the suspended 1920s ceiling before dripping, and pouring, and then crashing down excitingly in a mass of plaster on to a desk that the boys had only just vacated. The programme was still on the blackboard, in Peter’s famous handwriting, Webern’s
Six Pieces for Orchestra
and the
William Tell
overture, which had barely hit its stride when the first warm splat of water hit Phillipson’s neck.

‘Have you had a chance to admire the original ceiling, Headmaster?’ said Peter, unsure if he meant to amuse him or annoy him.

‘My whole concern,’ said the Headmaster, with that snuffling frankness that was his nearest shot at humour, ‘has been to get the thing patched up by Saturday!’

Peter scrunched his way among the herded chairs, Paul following, perhaps unsure of the seriousness of the event, peering around with a half-smile in the little primitive shock of being back in a classroom. ‘Matron must be mortified,’ Peter said, attributing finer feelings to her than she had given vent to at the time. He climbed up one of the A-shaped ladders supporting the platform Mr Sands and his son had been working from. ‘I’ve taken some photographs for the archives, by the way, Headmaster,’ he said, looking down with a precarious sense of advantage. The archives were a purely imaginary resource that the HM none the less wouldn’t want to deny. He and Paul gazed up at him with the usual mingled concern and impatience of the earthbound. ‘It’ll be wonderful if we can open up the whole thing.’

‘I advise you to make the most of it now,’ said the Headmaster. ‘It’s the last chance you’ll ever get.’ And again he glanced with a rough suspicion of humour at Paul.

‘Perhaps we could open it all up during the long vac?’

The Headmaster grunted, drawn against his will into a slightly undignified game. ‘When Sir Dudley Valance covered it up he knew exactly what he was doing.’

But Peter got Paul to climb up too, the planks jumping and yielding under their joint weight, and gripped his arm with insouciant firmness as they raised their heads and peered into the shadowy space between one ceiling and another. Their shoulders blocked most of the light through the hole, and towards the far end of the room this unexpected attic stretched away into complete darkness. It was perhaps two foot six high, the old dry timber smell confused with the rich smell of recent damp. ‘It’s hard to see,’ said Peter. ‘Hold on . . .’ and moving slowly he felt for his lighter in his jacket pocket, brought it up to head height and thumbed the flint. ‘Ruddy thing . . .’ Then he got it going and as he swept his arm in a slow arc they saw festive gleams and quickly swallowing shadows flow in and out of the little gilded domelets overhead. Between these there was shallow coffering, painted crimson and gold, and where the water had come through, bare laths and hanging fragments of horse-hair plaster. It seemed far from the architecture of everyday life, it was like finding a ruined pleasure palace, or burial chamber long since pillaged. Where the ceiling joined the nearest wall you could make out an ornate cornice, two gilded capitals and the murky apex of a large mirror.

‘Don’t set the place on fire, will you,’ said the Headmaster.

‘I promise not to,’ Peter said.

‘Fire and flood in one week . . .’ the Headmaster complained.

Peter winked at Paul by lighter-light, gazed slyly at his prim little mouth, slightly open as he peered upwards. ‘I’ve worked out this used to be the dining-room, you see,’ he said, the sound echoing secretively in the space. Then stooping down, ‘I was talking to the former Lady Valance about it the other night, Headmaster, she said it was her favourite room at Corley, with these absolutely marvellous jelly-mould domes.’

‘I’m not happy about you being up there,’ said the Headmaster.

‘I’m sure she’d love to come and see it again.’

‘Now, now, come on down.’

‘We’re coming,’ said Peter, squeezing Paul’s shoulder, and snapped the lighter shut. He wasn’t sure Paul was any more interested than the Headmaster himself. But the vision of the lost decoration, a glimpse of an uncharted further dimension of the house he was living in, was so stirring to him that it hardly mattered. It was a dream, a craze, put aside now almost ruefully in favour of his other craze, his bank-clerk friend.

‘Well, good to have met you,’ said the Headmaster as they went back into the hall. ‘And do bear in mind, if you want us to have your boy, put him down early: a number of OCs have been putting their boys down at birth – which is really the best advertisement a school can have.’

‘Oh . . . well, um . . . putting them down?’ said Paul – but the HM turned, and with a glance at his watch crossed to the huge hall table, an indestructible relic of the Valance days, snatched up the handbell which stood on it and rang it with implacable violence for ten seconds, as if repudiating by his stern management all the nonsense Peter had just been talking. And at once another old noise, high-pitched, echoing, with just a tinge of sadness for the lost silence, rose to life in the rooms beyond. Paul shivered, perhaps surprised by memory, and Peter pressed his hand in the small of his back as they moved towards the main stairs. Almost instantaneously, doors opened, and boys appeared in the hall. ‘Steady!’ the Headmaster shouted wearily. ‘Don’t run,’ and the boys curbed themselves and looked curiously at Paul as they went past. There was a strange atmosphere whenever someone from the outside world appeared in school, and Peter knew it would be talked about. He didn’t normally mind the lack of privacy, but for a moment it felt like being back at school himself. ‘Let’s get upstairs and have a drink,’ he murmured, with a pleasant but unencouraging nod to Milsom 1 as he filed past, clutching his Bible.

‘But what about Cecil?’ said Paul, hanging back on the third or fourth stair, with a regretful look.

‘Do you want to see him first? Okay, just a quick peek’ – Peter smiling narrowly at him and wondering if perhaps Cecil wasn’t a codeword after all. He led him back down, and off through the arch into the glazed cloister that ran along the side of the house. Work had already been put up here for the art exhibition. He bumped into Paul, as he halted politely to look at the watercolour sunsets pinned to boards. Here and there there was a sign of talent, something hopeful among the childish splodge. Art, which required technique as well as vision, was the subject Peter found most frustrating to teach; he wasn’t much good at it himself. He taught them perspective, in a strict way, which was something they might be grateful for. He wanted the warmth of Paul’s body, he leant on him and laid a hand along his shoulder, peering at a blotchy jam-jar of poppies by Priestman, which was thought to show promise. On what Neil McAll called ‘the sex front’ Peter’s time at Corley had been a desert, apart from a drunken night in London at half-term; it was shamingly clear that the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys had more fun than he did. Well, that was the age he’d started himself – he’d been at it ever since. He squeezed the back of Paul’s neck, a claim and a promise. Again it seemed strange that he fancied him as much as he did; and the mystery of it, which he had no desire to solve, only made the whole episode more compelling. In the chapel he was certainly going to kiss him, and get inside his clothes in one way or another; barring of course some possible rectitude of Paul’s about places of worship. ‘Come on,’ he said, taking his arm. But then as he turned the iron ring and eased open the chapel door, he heard the flagging wail of the harmonium. ‘Oh, Christ . . .’