Best Kept Secret

by Jeffrey Archer

  ‘I need to ask you something, man to man,’ he said, sounding even more pompous than usual. ‘Your response may well influence my decision as to whether I advise the admissions tutor at Cambridge to withdraw your scholarship, which would be a great sadness for us all at Beechcroft. However, my paramount responsibility is to uphold the school’s reputation.’

  Sebastian clenched his fists, and tried to remain calm. Being rusticated was one thing, but losing his place at Cambridge would be quite another. He stood there, waiting for the headmaster to continue.

  ‘Take your time before you answer my next question, Clifton, because it may well determine your future. Did Kaufman or Martinez play any part in your –’ the headmaster hesitated, clearly searching for the right word, but finally settled on repeating – ‘indiscretions?’

  Sebastian suppressed a smile. The idea of Victor Kaufman uttering the word ‘knickers’, let alone trying to remove said article of clothing from Ruby, would have caused incredulity and mirth, even among the lower fifth.

  ‘I can assure you, headmaster,’ said Sebastian, ‘that Victor has never, to my knowledge, smoked a cigarette or taken a sip of beer. And as for women, he’s embarrassed when he has to undress in front of Matron.’

  The headmaster smiled. Clearly Clifton had given the answer he’d wanted to hear, and it had the added advantage of being the truth.

  ‘And Martinez?’

  Sebastian had to think on his feet if was going to save his closest friend. He and Bruno had been inseparable since Sebastian had come to his aid during a dormitory pillow fight in his first term, when the new boy’s only crime was being ‘Johnny Foreigner’ and, even worse, hailing from a country that didn’t play cricket, a pastime Sebastian loathed – which only made their bond stronger. Sebastian knew that Bruno indulged in the occasional cigarette, and he had once joined him at a local pub for a beer, but only after their exams. He also knew that Bruno wouldn’t be averse to what Ruby had to offer. What he couldn’t be sure of was how much the headmaster already knew. Added to that was the fact that Bruno had also been offered a place at Cambridge in September and, although he’d only met his friend’s father a couple of times, he wouldn’t want to be the one held responsible for his son not going up to Cambridge.

  ‘And Martinez?’ the headmaster repeated a little more firmly.

  ‘Bruno, as I’m sure you know, headmaster, is a devout Roman Catholic, and he has told me on several occasions that the first woman he sleeps with will be his wife.’ That much was true, even if he hadn’t expressed that view quite so vociferously lately.

  The headmaster nodded thoughtfully, and Sebastian wondered for a moment if he’d got away with it, until Dr Banks-Williams added, ‘And what about the smoking and drinking?’

  ‘He did once try a cigarette during the holidays,’ admitted Sebastian, ‘but it made him sick, and to my knowledge he hasn’t indulged since.’ Well, not since last night, he was tempted to add. The headmaster looked unconvinced. ‘And I did see him drink a glass of champagne on one occasion, but only after he’d been offered a place at Cambridge. And he was with his father at the time.’

  What Sebastian didn’t admit was that after Mr Martinez had driven them back to school in his red Rolls-Royce that evening, Sebastian had smuggled the bottle into his study, where they’d finished it off after lights out. But Sebastian had read too many of his father’s detective novels not to know that guilty people often condemn themselves by saying one sentence too many.

  ‘I am obliged, Clifton, for your frankness in this matter. It can’t have been easy for you to be questioned about a friend. Nobody likes a sneak.’

  This was followed by another long pause, but Sebastian didn’t break it.

  ‘Clearly there is no reason for me to trouble Kaufman,’ the headmaster eventually managed, ‘although I will need to have a word with Martinez, just to ensure he doesn’t break any school rules during his last few days at Beechcroft.’

  Sebastian smiled, as a bead of sweat trickled down his nose.

  ‘Nevertheless, I have written to your father, explaining why you will be returning home a few days early. But because of your candour and evident remorse, I shall not be informing the admissions tutor at Cambridge that you have been rusticated.’

  ‘I’m most grateful, sir,’ said Sebastian, sounding genuinely relieved.

  ‘You will now return to your study, pack your belongings and prepare to leave immediately. Your housemaster has been forewarned, and will sort out your travel arrangements to Bristol.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Sebastian, his head bowed, for fear the headmaster might see the smirk on his face.

  ‘Do not attempt to contact either Kaufman or Martinez before you leave the school premises. And one other thing, Clifton, school rules will still apply to you until the last day of term. Should you break even one of them, I will not hesitate to reconsider my position concerning your place at Cambridge. Is that understood?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘Let us hope you have learnt something from this experience, Clifton, something that will benefit you in the future.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Sebastian, as the headmaster rose from behind his desk and handed him a letter.

  ‘Please give this to your father as soon as you get home.’

  ‘I most certainly will,’ said Sebastian, placing the letter in an inside pocket of his jacket.

  The headmaster thrust out his hand and Sebastian shook it, but without a great deal of enthusiasm.

  ‘Good luck, Clifton,’ the headmaster said unconvincingly.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Sebastian replied, before closing the door quietly behind him.

  The headmaster sat back down, well satisfied with how the meeting had gone. He was relieved, though not surprised, that Kaufman had not been involved in such a distasteful incident, especially as his father, Saul Kaufman, was a school governor, as well as chairman of Kaufman’s Bank, one of the most respected financial institutions in the City of London.

  And he certainly didn’t want to fall out with Martinez’s father, who had recently hinted that he would be giving a donation of £10,000 to the school library appeal if his son was offered a place at Cambridge. He wasn’t altogether sure how Don Pedro Martinez had made his fortune, but any fees or extras were always paid by return of post.

  Clifton, on the other hand, had been a problem from the moment he had walked through the school gates. The headmaster had tried to be understanding, in view of all that the boy’s mother and father had been through, but there was a limit to how much the school could be expected to tolerate. In fact, if Clifton hadn’t been likely to win that open scholarship to Cambridge, Dr Banks-Williams wouldn’t have hesitated to expel him some time ago. He was glad to have finally seen the back of him, and only hoped he wouldn’t join the Old Boys.

  ‘Old Boys,’ he said out loud, jogging his memory. He was due to address their annual dinner in London that evening, when he would present his end-of-term report; his last, after fifteen years as headmaster. He didn’t much care for the Welshman who had been chosen to succeed him; the sort of chap who didn’t tie his bow tie, and probably would have let Clifton off with a warning.

  His secretary had typed up his speech and left a copy on his desk for him to go over in case he wanted to make some late changes. He would have liked to read it one more time, but having to deal with Clifton had made that impossible. Any last-minute emendations would have to be added by hand during the train journey up to London.

  He checked his watch, placed the speech in his briefcase and headed upstairs to his private quarters. He was pleased to find that his wife had already packed his dinner jacket and trousers, a starched white shirt, a bow tie, a change of socks and a wash bag. He’d made it clear to the chairman of the Old Boys that he didn’t approve when they’d voted to stop wearing white tie and tails for the annual dinner.

  His wife drove him to the station, and they arrived only minutes before
the express to Paddington was due. He purchased a first-class return ticket and hurried across the bridge to the far platform, where an engine was just coming to a halt before disgorging its passengers. He stepped on to the platform and checked his watch again. Four minutes to spare. He nodded to the guard, who was exchanging a red flag for a green one.

  ‘All aboard,’ the guard shouted, as the headmaster headed for the first-class section at the front of the train.

  He climbed into the carriage and sank back into a corner seat, only to be greeted by a cloud of smoke. A disgusting habit. He agreed with The Times’ correspondent who had recently suggested that the Great Western Railway should designate far more no-smoking carriages for first-class passengers.

  The headmaster took the speech out of his briefcase and placed it on his lap. He looked up as the smoke cleared, and saw him sitting on the other side of the carriage.

  29

  SEBASTIAN STUBBED OUT his cigarette, leapt up, grabbed his suitcase from the rack above him and left the carriage without a word. He was painfully aware that although the headmaster said nothing, his eyes never left him.

  He humped his suitcase through several carriages to the far end of the train, where he squeezed himself into an overcrowded third-class carriage. As he stared out of the window, he tried to think if there was any way out of his present predicament.

  Perhaps he should return to first class and explain to the headmaster that he was going to spend a few days in London with his uncle, Sir Giles Barrington, MP? But why would he do that, when he’d been instructed to return to Bristol and hand Dr Banks-Williams’s letter to his father? The truth was that his parents were in Los Angeles attending a ceremony at which his mother was to be awarded her business degree, summa cum laude, and they wouldn’t be arriving back in England before the end of the week.

  Then why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, he could hear the headmaster saying, and then your housemaster could have issued you with the correct ticket? Because he had intended to return to Bristol on the last day of term, so when they turned up on Saturday, they would be none the wiser. He might even have got away with it, if he hadn’t been in a first-class carriage, smoking. After all, he’d been warned what the consequences would be if he broke another school rule before the end of term. End of term. He’d broken three school rules within an hour of leaving the premises. But then, he never thought he’d see the headmaster again in his life.

  He wanted to say, I’m an Old Boy now and I can do as I please, but he knew that wouldn’t work. And if he did decide to return to first class, there was a risk that the headmaster would discover he only had a third-class ticket; a wheeze he always tried on whenever he travelled to and from school at the beginning and end of term.

  He would occupy the corner seat of a first-class carriage, making sure he had a clear view of the corridor. The moment the ticket collector entered the far end of the carriage, Sebastian would nip out and disappear into the nearest lavatory, not locking the door but leaving the vacant sign in place. Once the ticket collector had moved on to the next carriage, he would slip back into the first-class compartment for the rest of the journey. And as it was a non-stop service, the wheeze never failed. Well, it had nearly failed once, when a vigilant conductor had doubled back and caught him in the wrong carriage. He’d immediately burst into tears and apologized, explaining that his mother and father always travelled first class, and he didn’t even realize there was a third class. He had got away with it, but then he’d only been eleven at the time. Now he was seventeen, and it wouldn’t only be the ticket collector who didn’t believe him.

  He dismissed any chance of a reprieve and, accepting that he wouldn’t be going up to Cambridge in September, Sebastian began to consider what he should do once the train pulled into Paddington.

  The headmaster didn’t even glance at his speech as the train sped through the countryside towards the capital.

  Should he go and look for the boy and demand an explanation? He knew Clifton’s housemaster had supplied him with a third-class single to Bristol, so what was he doing in a first-class carriage bound for London? Had he somehow got on the wrong train? No, that boy always knew in which direction he was going. He just hadn’t expected to be caught. In any case, he’d been smoking, despite having been explicitly told that school rules would apply until the last day of term. The boy hadn’t even waited an hour to defy him. There were no mitigating circumstances. Clifton had left him with no choice.

  He would announce at assembly tomorrow morning that Clifton had been expelled. He would then phone the admissions tutor at Peterhouse, and then the boy’s father, to explain why his son would no longer be going up to Cambridge that Michaelmas. After all, Dr Banks-Williams had to consider the good name of the school, which he had nurtured assiduously for the past fifteen years.

  He turned several pages of his speech before he came across the relevant passage. He read the words he’d written about Clifton’s achievement, hesitated for a moment, and then drew a line through them.

  Sebastian was considering whether he should be the first or the last off the train when it pulled into Paddington. It didn’t matter much, as long as he avoided bumping into the headmaster.

  He decided to be first, and perched on the edge of his seat for the last twenty minutes of the journey. He checked his pockets to find he had one pound twelve shillings and sixpence, far more than usual, but then his housemaster had reimbursed all his unspent pocket money.

  He had originally planned to spend a few days in London before returning to Bristol on the last day of term, when he had absolutely no intention of handing the headmaster’s letter to his father. He removed the envelope from his pocket. It was addressed to H.A. Clifton Esq.: Private. Sebastian glanced around the carriage to check that no one was looking at him before he ripped it open. He read the headmaster’s words slowly, and then reread them. The letter was measured, fair and, to his surprise, made no mention of Ruby. If only he’d taken the train to Bristol, gone home and handed the letter to his father after he returned from America, things might have been so different. Damn it. What was the headmaster doing on the train in the first place?

  Sebastian returned the letter to his pocket and tried to concentrate on what he would do in London, because he certainly wouldn’t be returning to Bristol until this had all blown over, and that might not be for some time. But how long could he hope to survive on one pound twelve shillings and sixpence? He was about to find out.

  He was standing by the carriage door long before the train pulled into Paddington, and had opened it even before it had come to a halt. He leapt out, ran towards the barrier as fast as his heavy suitcase would allow and handed his ticket to the collector before disappearing into the crowd.

  Sebastian had only visited London once before, and on that occasion he’d been with his parents, and there had been a car waiting to pick them up and whisk them off to his uncle’s town house in Smith Square. Uncle Giles had taken him to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels, and then on to Madame Tussaud’s to admire the waxworks of Edmund Hillary, Betty Grable and Don Bradman before having tea and a sticky bun at the Regent Palace Hotel. The following day he’d given them a tour of the House of Commons, and they’d seen Winston Churchill glowering from the front bench. Sebastian had been surprised to find how small he was.

  When it was time for him to go home, Sebastian had told his uncle that he couldn’t wait to come back to London. Now he had, there was no car to pick him up, and the last person he could risk visiting was his uncle. He had no idea where he would spend the night.

  As he made his way through the crowd, someone bumped into him, nearly knocking him over. He turned to see a young man hurrying away – he hadn’t even bothered to apologize.

  Sebastian walked out of the station and into a street crammed with Victorian terraced houses, several of which displayed bed-and-breakfast signs in their windows. He selected the one with the brightest polished door knocker and
the neatest window boxes. A comely woman wearing a floral nylon housecoat answered his knock, and gave her potential guest a welcoming smile. If she was surprised to find a young man in school uniform standing on her doorstep, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for accommodation, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sebastian, surprised to be called ‘sir’. ‘I need a room for the night, and wondered how much you charge?’

  ‘Four shillings a night, including breakfast, or a pound for a week.’

  ‘I only need a room for one night,’ said Sebastian, having realized he would have to search for cheaper accommodation in the morning if he intended to stay in London for any length of time.

  ‘Of course,’ she said as she picked up his suitcase and headed down the corridor.

  Sebastian had never seen a woman carrying a suitcase before, but she was halfway up the stairs before he could do anything about it.

  ‘My name’s Mrs Tibbet,’ she said, ‘but my regulars call me Tibby.’ When she reached the first-floor landing, she added, ‘I’ll be putting you in number seven. It’s at the back of the house, so you’re less likely to be woken by the morning traffic.’

  Sebastian had no idea what she was talking about, as he’d never been woken by traffic in his life.

  Mrs Tibbet unlocked the door to room seven and stood aside to allow her guest to enter. The room was smaller than his study at Beechcroft, but, like its owner, it was neat and tidy. There was a single bed, with clean sheets, and a washbasin in the corner.

  ‘You’ll find the bathroom at the end of the corridor,’ Mrs Tibbet said before he could ask.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind, Mrs Tibbet,’ he said, ‘I’ll take it for a week.’