The Stranger's Child Part 21

'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 Bs from a favourite master of his own. 'Voila!'

'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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d'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 p.r.i.c.kle.

'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-auth.o.r.ed 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 gla.s.s, and gave it a vigorous wipe with his handkerchief. Inside, between the gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 compet.i.tion. 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 a.s.suming 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 a.s.sumed they'd got to the s.e.x 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".'

'G.o.d, 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.

'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 a.s.sumed 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 sn.o.bbish 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.o.r.nography 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 heteros.e.xuals 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tles 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 s.e.x 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 p.u.b.erty, 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 s.e.xual 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 p.o.r.nography 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 a.s.sumed, 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 a.s.sume it's meant to sound as though I can't play to save my life.'