School for Murder

by Robert Barnard

  Glenda Grower gave Corbett Farraday the look old pros give when confronted by the naïvetés of fresh-faced amateurs.

  As Penny went over to the drinks table the headmaster was in full spate. Though he had no great stock of small talk he had a great store of commonplaces, which could be adapted to any subject.

  ‘There it is, I’m afraid,’ he was saying, ‘that’s the way it is today. When Europe speaks we click our heels and fall into line. Wasn’t like that in ’forty-five, eh, Coffin?’

  ‘Nor in ’eighteen,’ said Coffin. ‘Eh, Crumwallis?’

  ‘What it means,’ pursued the headmaster, ignoring him, ‘is first a gentle directive from the Ministry, then sterner ones, and so on.’

  ‘But surely the Ministwy can’t touch us, Headmaster?’ said Percy Makepeace, uneasy at the thought of still more horrendous disorder in his classes.

  ‘They can make life damned unpleasant for us if we don’t toe the line,’ said Edward Crumwallis. ‘No, I can see what this means: it’s the end of beating in our time.’

  Penny Warlock, cringing under the intense peer of Mrs Crumwallis, pricked up her ears. She wasn’t a fanatic, but she did think the slipper was used a bit too freely on the younger boys.

  ‘Is that a directive, Headmaster?’ she said.

  Edward Crumwallis did one of his characteristic swerves, and went abruptly off in the other direction.

  ‘A directive? Oh dear me, no, young lady. Why anticipate the evil hour? These jumped up jacks-in-office have things all too much their own way. No doubt we can drag our heels pretty effectively if we really try. Go by stages. Perhaps we could first take the right to slipper away from the prefects.’

  ‘They won’t like that,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘One of the perks of office. Pretty much the only damned perk they have.’

  ‘Perhaps we can bring it in next year,’ said the head. ‘When Hilary Frome is head boy. Frome could certainly bring it off without any trouble.’

  It was odd. At the mention of Hilary Frome a sudden silence fell over the room. The other teachers had been drifting towards the fire, anticipating, perhaps, a bit of an argy about beating, or a discussion of the pros and cons of Europe. But now they stopped, shifted in embarrassment, and Tom Tedder cast a sidelong glance at Miss Gilberd, and raised his eyebrows. Bill Muggeridge opened his mouth to say something, but happily only bad breath came out. The headmaster noticed nothing. He expected silence when he spoke, almost required it, and the more worshipful the better.

  ‘Ah yes, Frome can bring it in. A boy with a great deal of tact and delicacy.’

  ‘A refined thug,’ muttered Tom Tedder to Dorothea Gilberd.

  ‘I congratulate myself, in fact, on the idea of nominating him as head boy designate,’ pursued Edward Crumwallis. ‘Quite an inspiration. It takes the burden off Widgery in the lead-up to the GCE, and it gives Frome himself invaluable experience.’

  ‘It was the only way he could be sure of keeping him here next year,’ muttered Glenda Grower to Penny Warlock.

  ‘I observed him myself only last week, at the planning session for the all-Swessex schools athletics meeting. He has manner, that boy. Presence. He makes himself felt.’

  A monster, thought Percy Makepeace, tears squeezing themselves into his eyes. A trouble-maker, a stirrer-up, a tormentor.

  ‘No doubt the rest of you will be able to see him in action next week, on Parents’ Evening,’ proceeded Mr Crumwallis, smoothly bland.

  ‘Parents’ Evening?’ said Penny Warlock.

  ‘Parents’ Evening,’ repeated the head irritably. ‘Parents’ Evening is always the third Thursday in March.’

  ‘This is my first term here,’ said Penny defensively.

  ‘Well, you really must try to familiarize yourself with our traditions. What was I saying when I was interrupted? Ah yes. Frome has already expressed his willingness to help Mrs Crumwallis with the refreshments. He will organize the more presentable of the boarders to do the serving. I have no doubt he will make an excellent impression on the parents. A good-looking boy. Quiet in his manner, but very confident.’

  His assembled staff stared stonily back, as he looked round at them, apparently calling for some kind of congratulations. But the head seemed unable to leave the subject. As if seized with prophetic fire he raised his eyes to the ceiling, and said:

  ‘I predict that Frome is really going to make The Burleigh School talked about!’

  There was no visible reaction to this prophetic vision. No one suggested weaving a circle round the headmaster thrice, in view of the fact that he had obviously fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of paradise. All there was was an awkward clearing of throats and a gazing at shoes. Then Glenda Grower, the most strong-minded of the staff, put her glass down on the table and made obvious going-away gestures. Penny Warlock decided to follow suit.

  It was at this point that Mrs Crumwallis spoke aloud for the first time.

  ‘Miss Grower? That will be 40p. Miss Warlock? Two glasses, Miss Warlock—that’ll be 80p. Forty, Mr Freely, and one pound twenty, Mr Muggeridge. No, it can’t wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘You poor children,’ said Glenda Grower, turning to Penny Warlock and Toby as they slunk away. ‘You’ve so much to learn. This is how all social occasions at Burleigh end.’

  CHAPTER 2

  BURLEIGH

  The position of Burleigh School in the English educational system would be very difficult to explain to a foreigner (who has, God knows, enough to contend with in comprehending the other parts of the system). Nor would it be possible to refer him to any works of literature (before the present one) from which he could gain enlightenment. The prep schools have had their Orwell, the public schools their Connolly and Benedictus, the convent schools their Antonia White, the private boarding-schools their Waugh and Nicholas Blake. No one has thought it worth their while to eulogize or anathematize schools like Burleigh. Indeed, schools like Burleigh do not seem to be the sort of places from which writers emerge.

  And yet, any medium-sized town in the southern half of England has its Burleigh School: a private day school to which, for a not too exorbitant fee, parents can send their children and boast that they are privately educated. Not well educated, but privately. Burleigh itself had been founded—no, started—between the wars, had survived the Depression (as the South of England middle classes in general had so signally managed to coast blithely through the Depression) and had offered over the years an alternative to the Grammar, Secondary Modern and Technical Schools of the town of Cullbridge. Which meant, in effect, that though some parents chose to send their children there rather than to the Grammar School, many more sent them there because they failed their eleven-plus, that Beecher’s Brook of English childhood. With the coming of comprehensive education three years before, even the faint whiff of privilege attached to the Grammar School had evaporated, a fact on which Burleigh had been able to capitalize, in a mild way.

  Foreigners are always apt to find charming the examples they come across of quaint anachronisms, of dated anomalies, in English life. One such charming and dated anomaly is that a school like Burleigh can be bought. A man—any man—can buy such a place, set himself up as headmaster, and run it as he likes. Indeed, that is precisely what Edward Crumwallis had done. He had bought it from its previous aging owner/headmaster in 1969, and had been there ever since. This must not be taken to imply that Edward Crumwallis was unfit for his position. He was in fact a BA (3rd class, Geography) from the University of Hull (graduated 1948). Still, scholarship was not exactly his thing. He might take the odd class in Geography at a pinch, but he had never given the subject any particular prominence in the school, and most boys gave it up after two years. Nor was Crumwallis anxious to take over periods in other subjects when there was need—as in cases of sickness or (frequently) death. Since his graduation he had not cultivated Learning. He had cultivated Manner. He had bought Burleigh (which he invariably called The Burleigh School, in capitals) precisely so that his manne
r might be given free rein and ample pasturage. A very good manner it was too, with parents—decidedly impressive. It certainly impressed those of limited intelligence, among whom may be numbered Crumwallis himself. He really believed in it: he not only thought that others should remain silent during his threadbare pontifications, but he actually believed they would benefit from them. Such a conspicuous lack of self-knowledge has its dangers.

  Not that the Manner—which he intended should be so admired later in the week on Parents’ Evening—was particularly in evidence on the Monday, as he sat at his study desk and went over the plans for that event with his wife. The side of Edward Crumwallis that was most evident during such tête-à-têtes was the petty-minded, niggling side (that side of his psychological profile that was seldom turned in the parents’ direction).

  ‘The question is, shall we splurge on the coffee and scrimp on the tea, or vice versa,’ he was saying, in that thin, scratchy voice of his that his wife did not seem to notice. ‘Now, which parents who matter are coming, and what do they generally drink?’

  Enid Crumwallis, behind her pebble glasses, might be seen to screw up her eyes. This was the sort of question that her intellect most enjoyed exercising itself on. She had a mind like a computer, with indefinite retrieval of unimportant facts.

  ‘Well, now—Mr and Mrs Quigly are coming, and they drink tea. And so do Mrs Patterson and the Reverend Martins. On the other hand Major Tilney usually drinks coffee . . .’

  ‘Ah—pity.’

  ‘But then, Dr and Mrs Frome almost always take tea.’

  ‘That settles it. Tea it is. I’ll say to the Major ‘I particularly recommend the tea.’ Get a good, straightforward Ceylon. Earl Grey never goes down well in a boys’ school—there’s that touch of Milady’s Boudoir about it. And instant coffee. Now, biscuits—shall we say two per parent? Yes, two.’

  ‘Marie biscuits,’ catalogued his wife.

  ‘And some sort of non-alcoholic fruit cup for the boarders who do the serving out.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’ asked his wife, who had all the instincts that would, a century ago, have made her a successful workhouse mistress.

  ‘I’m afraid so. The parents are quick to seize on anything that might suggest we use boys as unpaid labour. A sad reflection on human nature, and the times we live in, but true. Some sort of squash will do, but put some slices of apple and orange in, to make it look something special.’

  The festive deliberations were interrupted by a knock at the door.

  ‘Oh, Mr Crumwallis, I’m awfully sorry to interrupt—’

  Miss Dorothea Gilberd’s comfortable face came round the door, and then her comfortable figure came in.

  ‘Awfully sorry. I can see you’re busy. But Mother was rather poorly this morning, and I wondered if I might skip 2B English and just rush home and see to her a bit.’

  Miss Gilberd was a great asset to Burleigh. Motherly but firm, ignorant but insistent on communicating what she did know, she was an excellent teacher for the lower forms. She knew her limitations better than she knew her worth, and she taught in a private school because it gave her a little more latitude to come and go as she wished—an important point, since she cared for an old mother whom eighty years had made exacting. Mr Crumwallis was very understanding. He wanted to keep her.

  ‘I’m sure that can be arranged, Miss Gilberd. I expect Mr Freely will be willing to oblige.’

  ‘It’s only poetry . . .’

  ‘Well, there should be no problem, then.’

  ‘I’ll be back after lunch.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I know I can trust you . . . Oh, and Miss Gilberd—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Those biscuits of yours that went down so very well at the last Parents’ Evening. I wonder—’

  Compliments always caught Miss Gilberd on the hop, she was so little used to them. She blushed.

  ‘Of course, Headmaster. Only too happy . . .’

  ‘Ah,’ said Edward Crumwallis as she withdrew. ‘A happy thought. Cross off the Maries.’

  His wife stared, her piggy eyes speculative, at the door.

  ‘You do realize, don’t you, that she’s in love with that Tom Tedder?’

  Her husband laughed, a high sound like radiophonic interference on a shortwave band.

  ‘Of course. We’ve discussed it many times, Enid. All to the good, you know. It might keep her here after that mother of hers dies.’

  ‘What we discussed was infaturation,’ said Enid Crumwallis, who had a fund of malapropisms acquired unconsciously from her cook. ‘So far she’s just been infaturated with him. But I was standing near her at prayers this morning. I saw her looking at him. It’s gone beyond that now. It’s love, that’s what it is. Love.’

  Edward Crumwallis let out more silvery squeaks of amusement.

  ‘Good heavens, Enid, what nonsense. Love, infatuation: what would you know about that?’

  What, indeed?

  • • •

  Dorothea Gilberd had already asked Toby Freely to take over her class in English. Toby was in fact if not in name in charge of the twenty-seven boarders at Burleigh, and he spent much of the day with nothing to do. In the afternoons he sometimes helped with games, or stood in for Bill Muggeridge in the gym, if Bill wanted to go home and check up on his wife (which he quite often did). Or he stood in for one or other of the teachers, notably Miss Gilberd when she wanted to ‘pop home’, or Mr McWhirter when he failed altogether to arrive. But quite a lot of the day Toby spent wandering around the school, not because he was naturally idle, but because it was his first job, and the school fascinated him. Sometimes he wondered how the teachers could go on living, knowing this was to be their life, until the end.

  He would stand in the corridor which ran along past the junior classrooms, as he had done that morning, and listen to the lessons being given. Some of them, in fact, were perfectly good. Septimus Coffin could call on forty years of experience, and in so far as Latin could be made entertaining, he made it so. Glenda Grower was positively a genius. He could stand listening to her classes for hours. She stood there, tall, slim, striking, her hair catching light from the sun, and she told them about history or exotic religions—dramatically, humanly, but cleverly mixing in the dry bits with the drama.

  But to stand outside listening to Percy Makepeace’s classes, as he had done today, was to die a little. What went on there was not education, nor even the appearance of education. It was a good old traditional teacher-roasting.

  ‘The square on the hypotenuse,’ said Percy Makepeace for the tenth time.

  ‘The square on the hippopotamus,’ chorused three or four boys.

  ‘Please sir, how did the hippopotamus get a square on him?’ shrilled one teenage wit.

  ‘It was a square hippopotamus to start with, you oaf,’ yelled another.

  ‘Please sir, is this Euclid?’ came from the back of the room. It was a signal for one of their favourite litanies.

  ‘You-clid!’ came from one boy at the front.

  ‘You-thanasia!’ contributed a boy near the back.

  ‘You-genics!’

  ‘You-topia!’

  ‘You-tube!’

  If he lingered at the end of the corridor he could see the class without Percy Makepeace seeing him. But he knew what he would see. Seated in the middle of the uproar would be Hilary Frome, who was destined, according to the headmaster, to make Burleigh School talked about. At first sight one might think he was taking no part in the uproar, but Toby had only recently completed his own schooldays, and he had soon realized that Hilary controlled it. Percy Makepeace, too, knew that, and seldom took his eyes off him. He was a willowy boy, firm of body; his hair was fair, and a lock fell over his right eye. His lips were curled in contemptuous amusement—lips with a suggestion of fullness about them. He looked, Toby thought, the kind of boy who might play the passive role in some bent porno film—and, indeed, were he asked Hilary Frome would certainly have been willing. Hilary was a bo
y who saw himself as a connoisseur of experience.

  It was not only Percy Makepeace who kept his eyes on Hilary. The boys contributing to the uproar did so as well, and were rewarded for any unusually telling stroke of humour (within the tradition-bound schoolboy framework) by a smirk of appreciation. He was conducting the whole thing, with a minimum of gesture: a sort of schoolboy Adrian Boult.

  ‘Stop this noise! STOP THIS NOISE! If there is any more of this I shall weport you to the headmaster.’

  ‘MAKE PEACE NOT WAR!’ chorused the boys.

  ‘You should love your neighbour, sir. Isn’t that what you learn in church?’ (Mr Makepeace’s obsessive frequenting of High Anglican church services was well known.)

  ‘Do you love your neighbour, sir? Is Willis your neighbour? Miss Warlock says everyone is your neighbour. Do you love Willis, sir?’

  ‘Oh, sir,’ said Willis, with elephantine coyness.

  ‘I say,’ said Hilary Frome, as the shrieks of laughter reached a crescendo. ‘Isn’t it about time we got down to some work? After all, you are paid to teach . . . sir.’

  The class took it as a signal. Within thirty seconds they were all sitting, if not working, with some semblance of order. Out in the corridor Toby found he was sweating. He let out a long-held breath. How, he asked himself, how could one put up with that, day after day. He looked at his watch. Ten-forty. He would wait and see if Mr McWhirter arrived, or if he would have to fill in. Because Mr McWhirter—he who had put money into the school—was in a privileged position, and he took every advantage of it.

  But when he strolled out into the front drive, Mr McWhirter was being decanted from a neighbour’s car at the front gate. Mr McWhirter had had his first two periods free, as usual, the timetable being constructed around Mr McWhirter’s convenience and preferences. From the front gate he shuffled down the drive, a slow shuffle, because he was afflicted with chilblains. At periods of especial affliction he wore shoes slit down the side and stuffed with newspapers. He suffered a desperate need of heat, and on occasion would come to school with a great hole in the back calf of his trousers, surrounded by scorch marks. Next day he would come with a rough square tacked on to the inside. Before long, that too would be scorched. He looked, in fact, less like a man of academic attainment than a scarecrow kept in the garden of a man of academic attainment. Perhaps for this reason it was rumoured among the boys that he was a millionaire. He shuffled straight past Toby, eyes fixed straight ahead, and arrived at 4A one minute before his class was due to begin.