After his supper he went back upstairs and got down his diary from the top of the wardrobe. He had hardly made his mark on the room – his slippers and dressing-gown, a few books he’d stuffed into his bag. He had the new Angus Wilson out of the library, and was getting through it in his own way, with a restless eye running ahead for the appearances of Marcus, the queer son, whose antics he pondered as if for portents or advice. He didn’t want to read this at home and risk his mother asking questions. Also the latest Penguin Modern Poets, The Mersey Sound , which he didn’t really think was poetry at all; and Poems of To-day , in fact published over fifty years ago, and full of things that he loved and knew by heart, such as Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Valance’s ‘Soldiers Dreaming’. The room had a hard square armchair in prickly moquette and up against the window a ladies’ dressing-table with three mirrors and a stool, which was where Paul sat each night to do his writing. Whenever he looked up he saw himself, the Bryant nose in triumphant triplicate, his two profiles playing hide and seek with each other. He’d been keeping his diary since he left school, a top-secret record, and the volumes themselves, black quarto notebooks, were growing harder to hide as they amassed. At home he had a box under the bed in which old school projects and browning newsprint concealed a lower layer of private things, frail mementoes of boys at school, three issues of Manifique! , with muscle-men in posing pouches, sometimes clearly drawn on afterwards, and then the diaries themselves, in which Paul let himself go in a way that these publications weren’t allowed to.
Now he leant forward, like a schoolboy shielding his work, and wrote: ‘June 29th 1967: hot and sunny all day.’As he wrote he pressed very hard with his biro into the page, so that the paper itself seemed to spread and rise in a curl at the margins. When closed, the book showed exactly how much of it had been used up. The written pages, their edges crinkly and darkened, were a pleasing proof of industry, the rest of the book, clean, trim and dense, a pleasing challenge. This week had been rich in material, and he had summed up the girls at work and given Geoff Viner a franker appraisal than was possible in the bank itself. Now he had his chat with Geoff in the toilets to write up, and the whole unexpected adventure at ‘Carraveen’. ‘It turns out Mrs J was married to Dudley Valance, C’s brother. But she also had big affair with Cecil V before WW1, said he was her first love, he was madly attractive but bad with women. I said what did she mean. She said, “He didn’t really understand women, you know, but he was completely irresistible to them. Of course he was only 25 when he was killed.” ’ At the foot of the page, where the edge of his writing hand had rested, the greasy paper resisted the ink, and he had to go over some of the words twice: ‘completely irresistible’, he wrote again, ‘only 25’ – the effect bold and clumsy, like the writing of someone who was still drunk or slightly mad.
Peter Rowe came out of his room on the top floor, crossed the landing, and looked over the banister into the great square stairwell. Below him he could hear and then for a moment see a small boy hurrying downwards, saw a raised arm struggling into a jacket. ‘Don’t run!’ Peter shouted, with such abrupt and godlike effect that the boy looked up in horror, lost his footing, and slid down bump bump bump on the hard oak treads into the hall. ‘Now you know why,’ Peter said, more quietly, and went back into his room.
He had the first period free, then it was the Fifth Form for singing. He filled his kettle at the basin, vaguely rinsed a mug for his Nescafé: the granules started melting and fizzing on the wet bottom. Then he lit himself a cigarette, first of the day, and squinting in the smoke tugged his bed up fairly straight and covered its irregularities with his rug. Along the corridor, he knew, Matron would be going from dorm to dorm, head down, breathing through her mouth. Wherever she found a bed improperly made, its corners loose, its top sheet less than taut, she stooped and tossed it, like a bull, made a total mess of it, and wrote the offending boy’s name on a card. The card was then pinned on the board by the staff-room, and in break the delinquents would have to pant upstairs and set about making the whole thing again from scratch, square and smooth and tight as a strait-jacket. Peter felt a twinge of guilty relief at his exemption from this regime.
He started on his weekly letter to his parents, a practice he did keep up as strictly as the boys. ‘Dearest Mum and Dad,’ he wrote, ‘What a beautiful week it has been. I’m glad, because it’s the semi-final of the garden competition on Sunday. The HM is to be the judge, and as he knows nothing at all about gardens it’s hard to know what he’ll be looking for, colour or “concept”. The boy Dupont whom I’ve told you about has built a rockery with a waterfall, but the HM, who has very plain tastes, may find this too “fiddly”. Besides that, things are building up nicely to Open Day. Colonel Sprague is very involved with organizing it all. He is true to type and rather a monster. I call him the Infolonel Colonel.’ Peter smoked for a bit, and drank his coffee. He thought he probably couldn’t divert his parents with the Headmaster’s latest obsession, the spread of supposedly sexy books among the higher forms. It was on the agenda for next week’s staff-meeting. Already this term the HM had confiscated Peyton Place and The Carpetbaggers , both on hearsay rather than any knowledge of their contents, which was doubtless why the boys themselves slogged through them. Dr No , found in Walters’s tuck-box, had been passed to Peter, as being possibly ‘more broad-minded’, for a judgement. He’d read it last night at a sitting and found three sentences in it unexpectedly arousing; of course he’d seen the film, which was much more exciting: on the page the plot looked slight and awkward, the whole thing explained by the villain himself in an enormous monologue. He noted a sort of tight-lipped sadism in the accounts of James Bond’s body and the injuries inflicted on it, but as in a movie the wounds all healed by the scene after next. The boys, of course, in the first derangement of puberty, could be ‘turned on’ by just about anything. Peter knew he had been so himself, and so saw the present purge as inherently futile. He stubbed out his cigarette, and told his parents instead about the First XI match against Beasleys.
At 9.35, with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable, Peter opened his door again and went out on to the landing. In the glance he gave back into his room he saw it as a stranger might, as an appalling mess. He went down one circuit of the main staircase, and set off along the broad first-floor corridor. The classrooms at Corley Court occupied six rooms on the ground floor, but the room with the piano was isolated, with the sick-bay, in the rambling far end of the floor above. Boys with temperatures or infectious diseases were harassed through the wall by ragged bursts of folksong or the torturous practice of scales. He passed the Headmaster’s sitting-room, which must once have been a principal bedroom of the house: its high Gothic oriel looked out down the axis of the formal gardens, which now survived only in photographs but had once been a dazzling floral maze. A melancholy fishpond at the centre of the lawn was all that was left.
Peter had got the Corley job in the middle of the year, after the clouded departure of a man called Holdsworth, and took to the house from the start, in part out of natural sympathy for something so widely abused. ‘A Victorian monstrosity’ was the smug routine phrase. He had heard a boy in the First Form opine that Corley Court was ‘a Victorian monstrosity, and one of the very worst’, with just the same humourless laugh the boy’s father must have used when describing the place. In fact, the house was perfect for a boarding-school – secluded, labyrinthine, faintly menacing, with its own tree-lined park now mown and marked out in pitches. No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an institution of learning it was pretty much ideal. Peter had started to research its history. Last year he had signed a petition to save St Pancras Station, and at Corley too he loved the polychrome brick and the fierce Gothic detail which were such an amusing challenge to more gracious notions of the English country house – though the rooms inside, which had been altered between the wars, were disappointingly bright and inoffensive. Only the chapel, the library and the great oak staircase, with its shield-bearing wyverns on the newels, had completely escaped the hygienic clean-up of the 1920s. The library was useful as it was, and the chapel, a real High Victorian gem, was also the site of the school’s strangest feature, the white marble tomb of the poet Cecil Valance.
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