Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘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.