Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘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.