Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘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.

‘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.