by Phillip Rock
“The ones your mother used to bake?”
“And her mother before that, let me tell you.”
The scones were heaped on a platter and covered with a white napkin. Charles took one, hot from the oven, and bit into it, scorning butter or jam.
“Delicious.”
“Yes, I thought as much meself. Young Millie has a natural talent for baking. I’ll show her how to make a porter cake. Guinness, brown sugar … walnuts and cherries … lemon peel and sultanas, eggs and flour … keep for a week before eating. Oh, it’s a lovely cake it is.”
At seventy-eight, Mrs. Mahon was more likely to talk about cooking than actually to do any. Millie was in charge of the kitchen staff now. She was a young woman from Somerset, strong as an ox, with a West Country accent few could fathom.
Charles reached for another scone as Mrs. Mahon poured him a cup of tea. “I’m glad I was the first one down.”
“Oh, Mr. Simpson was up at the crack of dawn, thunderin’ out into the wind he was with never so much as a sip or a bite to sustain him. I saw him from the kitchen windows runnin’ toward the playin’ fields like the devil was chasin’ after him.”
“I’ll go and see what he’s up to. You might fill a vacuum bottle with tea and I’ll take it out to him.”
“I’ll do that. Be the cricket ground. He’s been mutterin’ about it since Christmas.”
Charles, vacuum bottle in hand and a pocket filled with scones, braced his body against the gale and walked into the teeth of it. A dying oak at the bottom of the lane was down, sprawled in all its leafless magnificence across the gravel road and two fences. He skirted the tangle of limbs and branches and cut across the field that the boys used for football and the girls for hockey. He could see the tall, stooped figure of George Simpson beyond the low hedge in the adjoining field. He was staring down at the ruined pitch and even at fifty yards Charles could see that his expression was grim. Winter snow and frost followed by the rains had scarred the billiard-table smoothness of the cricket ground, cutting miniature ravines and covering the once velvet grass with a layer of mud—mud that was fast drying in the wind.
“I brought you some tea, George,” Charles said as he came up to the big man.
“Bless you,” he said with a weary sigh. “I hope you put a large glass of whisky in it.”
“Sorry. Sugar and milk.”
“It’ll have to do, I suppose. But I could go for a painkiller.” He took the thermos, turned his back to the wind, and unscrewed the cap with his almost fingerless right hand. “Have you ever seen such an unholy mess? The pitch is ruined. The rain was bad enough, but now this blasted sirocco has to pop out of nowhere and compound the bloody problem. A frightfully un-English wind, if you ask me.”
“I daresay it will blow itself out by end of day.”
“Rolled in from Spain no doubt … or North Africa. One can almost smell the red dust and oranges.” He filled the cap with tea and slurped it down.
Charles reached into his pocket. “Care for some scones?”
“Oh, Lord yes. A full belly makes for a happy man.” He took a scone and devoured it in two bites. “Or at least reasonably happy. Cricket will be a farce this summer.”
“It’s always a farce. No one is quite up to it.”
“I held hopes of altering that this year. Thursby major shows promise of being a cracking good slow bowler and I’ve finally convinced Manderson that there can be great joy in slapping a hard red ball with a white bat. All for naught now.”
“And I always thought that Royal Engineer officers were impervious to despair. Have another scone.”
Simpson took one and munched it slowly, his gloomy eyes roving the field. “The muck’s hardening as a shell of clay. Need a tractor to shave the ground, grade it smooth. Turn the earth. Reseed it. Cut and roll. Bloody big job, Greville. Far beyond our capacities.”
“There’s a firm of landscape gardeners in Guildford that can build entire city parks. I’m quite sure they’re capable of fixing this meager expanse of earth.”
“Yes, I daresay they are—at a not very meager price. Several hundred pounds could be better spent elsewhere.”
“Perhaps. And yet, sports have their place. We’ll never field teams that could punish Charterhouse or Eton, but we could beat a few schools with some luck and a honing of skills. Be most uplifting for the chaps. A few hundred quid isn’t too steep a price to pay.”
“I doubt if we could find any decent school that would play us.”
“Then we’ll find an indecent one. I must say, George, you’re being excessively dour this morning.”
“I am, yes, what with this damn wind and lying awake most of the night thinking of the science lab.”
“Oh? What’s the matter with the lab?”
“Bloody nothing. Up to the minute. As good a facility for its size as one would find at Cambridge. And all of it out of your pocket. It doesn’t seem right somehow. You’re not a bottomless pit of pounds, shillings, and pence. It seems to me that the school should pay its own way. Not entirely out of tuitions, of course, but at least from contributions. There are hordes of wealthy people who are interested in progressive education. Old Mastwick knew how to tap that source. You ignore it and reach for your checkbook instead.”
“I’m not John Mastwick. I don’t have his powers of persuasion and I can’t shuttle about the country giving speeches and passing the hat. I would find that impossible. I’m sure you understand if anyone does.”
Simpson placed his war-ruined hand on Charles’s shoulder. “Of course I do, dear fellow. I know what a struggle it’s been for you over the years and … well, damn it man, I admire your courage. You’re a smashing headmaster in all ways. I just hate to see you pay for bloody everything the school needs.”
“I can afford it. And besides, there’s little else I care to spend money on.”
Nothing, in fact. His clothing was good, serviceable, and decidedly out of date. His little Austin car looked shabby and claptrap compared to the gleaming machines that glided along the road past the school on their way to the new country club, but it remained functional thanks to Simpson and some of the sixth-form boys who were wizards at mechanics. As for a social life, it was practically nonexistent. He was an honorary member of the country club—it had been built on Stanmore property—and occasionally went there to play a round of golf. He was a scratch player and would sometimes join a foursome, although he preferred to go at odd hours and play a lone round. He rarely went to the clubhouse after a game. He had little in common with the other members and found their boisterous conversations unnerving and virtually incomprehensible. He stood apart from them in manner and dress. He liked to play in old corduroy trousers and a worn Shetland sweater. The others dressed in the current style, plus-fours and Argyles, even kilts and tam-o-shanters. His drabness among such gaudy plumage was taken for eccentricity. But these wealthy, middle-class businessmen vied to play with him for the sheer snobbish pleasure of letting drop at their city clubs that they had played a round that weekend with “Viscount Amberley, you know.”
He gave with pleasure to the school because the school was the center of his life. He felt secure and content within its boundaries. There was an order and a logic to the place not apparent to outsiders. His father saw only chaos and undisciplined tatterdemalions, but then he could only compare Burgate House with his own school days at Winchester, the uniformed boys and robed masters, the strict Wykehamist traditions of centuries. There were traditions at Burgate House, such as the student soviet, but they were not easily understood by the public-school mind.
The wind died in the early afternoon, leaving a balmy stillness and cloudless skies. The school went out of doors after lunch, the older boys and girls to help the caretaker and the two gardeners attack the storm damage, mainly the fallen oak, the others attending impromptu classes on the lawns or in the battered rose garden.
Charles completed correcting some sixth-form English essays in his study and then went for a walk around
the grounds. Passing the old stables at the rear of the house he spotted Marian Halliday and a small group of her students seated in the shade of the apple orchard. Marian, a strikingly pretty redhead in her early thirties, lived in Abingdon and taught drawing and watercoloring three or four times a week. Once a costume designer for the Old Vic, she had been married for several stormy years to Gerald Halliday, matinee idol and rising star of British films. Their sensationally titillating divorce proceedings had been reported with such relish by the popular press that she had fled London after receiving her decree nisi, to escape from the notoriety of it all in the leafy glades of the country. Boredom, and an awareness that Burgate House had a reputation for being a sanctuary of sorts, had brought her to the school where her talents had been greatly appreciated for the past two years and no questions had ever been asked.
Charles waved to her and she moved her hand in a casual come-hither gesture, stood up and walked slowly toward him. He met her halfway.
“Anything the matter, Marian?”
“Don’t look, but there’s a boy skulking among the trees. I’ve been noticing him for the past ten minutes or so.”
“Not one of ours, I take it.”
“Definitely not one of ours. Elevenish, I would judge. Fat and untidy. School cap and blazer a little the worse for wear. Not very adept at hiding. A sort of if-I-can’t-see-you, you-can’t-see-me approach to concealment. He looks rather pathetic—and hungry. I didn’t wish to scare him away by any overt reaction to his presence.”
“Yes. Well. I see that Hawkins and Manderson are in your group. Tell them what’s up and that I’d like to see the boy in my study. They’ll know how to manage it.”
“Another runaway, I imagine.”
“No doubt of it. Probably cost us a telephone call and a railroad ticket.”
“And lunch.”
“I don’t begrudge a bit of food, but I do feel that our fellow schools should have the common decency to reimburse us for the return of their own.”
She stifled a laugh and pressed her long, slender fingers into his arm. “Oh, my dear Greville. What a dreamer you are! Fellow schools, indeed! We’re dogsbody here. Odd man out. Our fellow schools probably resent getting their flotsam back.”
“This makes the sixth so far this year. Quite an epidemic.” He spotted a slight movement among the trees, a round, white face peeking out from behind a gnarled trunk. He looked away. “Remind the lads that gently does it.”
Boys and girls ran away from boarding schools for a variety of reasons, the most common being simple homesickness. Those who ran away for that reason went home, to be returned to their schools by annoyed parents. Those who ran away and showed up at Burgate House were drawn by the school itself, by what they had heard or read of it—usually heard through the grapevine and so highly embroidered as to bear little resemblance to reality. A paradise, it was said, where there were no rules or regulations, no codes, no bells, no study, no Latin or Greek verbs to cram, no prefects, fagging, bullying, or caning. A wonderland of freedom and play. It was usually the lazy and the malcontent who came knocking at the door—to be sent away promptly and firmly, much to their chagrin.
The boy that Hawkins and Manderson half pushed, half dragged into his study was plump, untidy, and dirty. He was also sniveling and had, judging by the dark stain spreading on his short gray flannels, peed in his pants. The badge on his jacket, an embroidered emblem of a griffin holding a sword in one paw and a Celtic cross in the other, proclaimed him to be a boy from Archdean, an old and honorable public school in Wiltshire.
“Gave us an awful time, sir,” Manderson said with a note of apology in his voice. “But we didn’t hurt him.”
“There’s blood on his knees.”
“Yes, sir,” Hawkins said. “We came up behind him and he bolted. Tripped over a root. Mrs. Halliday’s gone for the first aid kit.”
“You might hop along and see if you can find a pair of gym shorts. On the large side. Fitzwilliam’s, perhaps.”
“He pissed. Keeps saying he’s sorry. Told him it didn’t matter to us, but it made him blubber something fierce.”
“Something fierce is slang English.”
Hawkins, a tall, strong boy of thirteen, grinned and then patted the runaway on the top of his head. “Sorry, sir, but he blubbered all the same … poor blighter.”
“Be off with you. You, too, Manderson.”
They left hurriedly and the boy from Archdean, released from their grasp, sagged to the floor in a sodden lump of misery. Sobs, barely repressed, shook him as a fever.
“You can get up,” Charles said quietly, “and sit on that chair in front of the desk.”
“I … I … can’t …”
“Of course you can. Anyone can sit in a chair. There’s nothing to it. Now kindly do as you’re told.”
The boy, eyes screwed shut against the tears streaming down his fat cheeks, groped blindly for the chair and pulled himself onto it, curling his body into the concave leather back.
“That’s more like it. Are your knees terribly painful?”
“N-n-no, sir,” the boy whispered to the chair.
“I’m sure they must sting a bit. We’ll fix that as soon as Mrs. Halliday arrives. Mrs. Halliday’s brother is ‘Scorcher’ O’Hara, captain of the Charlton Athletic, so she’s quite familiar with banged-up knees. You ran away from Archdean. Feel up to telling me why?”
He did not. The mention of his school drove him into a shuddering silence that appeared close to catatonia.
“I didn’t get anything out of him,” Charles said quietly as Marian hurried into the study carrying the first aid box.
“No wonder.” There was an edge to her voice. “Those two larrikins pounced on the poor fellow like two wolves on a rabbit. Scared him out of his wits. Oh, dear,” she murmured as she knelt on the carpet in front of the chair. “Fresh underpants are in order, I’m afraid.”
“Yes—and a bath. I’ll get hold of Matron, and perhaps Gowers and Wilson can be of some help. They head the runaway committee this term. Maybe they can coax information out of him. I certainly can’t.”
Marian touched the boy on the cheek. “What school are you from, dear?”
The boy squeezed his eyes tighter and shook his head.
“That much I know,” Charles whispered to her. “Archdean … near Chippenham.”
“You could give them a ring, I suppose.”
“I’d prefer to give them a name rather than a description. He’s not a lost dog.”
“No,” she said, dabbing cotton wool on the boy’s knees, “he most certainly is not!”
There was nothing for Charles to do. Word of the runaway’s arrival had spread through the school from the moment he had been caught in the orchard. It had not been necessary for Charles to send for Gowers and Wilson, nor to inform the seven members of the soviet. Mrs. Halliday’s scattering class had seen to that before the unknown boy had been dragged into the study.
Charles had been waiting a little less than half an hour, when he heard footsteps coming along the corridor. There was a respectful knock on the half-open door and Gowers and Wilson entered the study. They were both seventeen and in the upper sixth form. Wilson was a strapping six footer and the school’s best athlete. Gowers was a hunchback.
“Well?” Charles said.
“He’s in the tub,” Gowers said. “Matron’s doing the honors.”
“Has the lad said anything?”
Gowers and Wilson exchanged glances. “Not really necessary, sir.”
“No,” Wilson said. “It’s quite evident why he took French leave. His poor old bum looks like a bruised apple.”
“Someone thrashed him good and proper.”
A FAT, DIRTY, untidy boy. A scug in other words, Charles thought, remembering his Eton slang. Scugs had been treated without mercy at Eton, as they no doubt had been treated at other schools, and presumably still were. Singled out by their very grossness of appearance or habits by every bully or cane-w
ielding prefect and fag master. He remembered a boy named Thorne who shirked all games and was of uncouth appearance. A disgrace to the house and the college. A dozen members of Pop had come to the dormitory one wintry night and dragged Thorne shrieking from his bed, stripped him, whipped him with a birch cane, and then had carried him out into the sleeting night and tossed him into the freezing river. Thorne had left Eton a few days later and had been hooted all the way to the train station. A fat, dirty, untidy boy.
The winter of 1904. He had been thirteen, a year younger than poor Thorne. He had done nothing to save him. Had watched silently as he had been carried away and had felt no outrage toward Pop, had in fact heartfully accepted his election into that most ancient of Eton societies a year or two later. He had learned a great deal about human pain and suffering since then. It was far too late to cry out against Thorne’s terror so long ago, but he felt a sense of shame and outrage now.
“Why were you beaten?”
The boy shifted uncomfortably on the seat in Charles’s study. He was wearing gym shorts and a pullover too large for him. He looked better now that he had been bathed and fed, but his eyes were still swollen from weeping and he shifted them everywhere to avoid looking at the tall man seated behind the oak desk.
“There’s little point in your remaining silent. Quite rude, in fact, considering how decently you’ve been treated here—Master Ramsay … Ramsay, D.” The boy drew in his breath sharply. “No need to be surprised. There was a name tag inside your jacket. What does the D stand for? David?”
“Derek … sir,” the boy whispered.
“Derek Ramsay. Nice name. I shall venture a guess. You may correct me if I’m wrong. You were probably called Dirt-ee Ram-see at Archdean.”
He cowered back in his seat and looked wildly about him as though expecting to see his tormentors. “They didn’t have to tell you that. They needn’t—”
“No one has told me anything, Ramsay. I haven’t phoned your school yet. Some things never change. When I was at Eton we had a boy by the name of Allenby who was always getting ink on his cuffs and collar. We called him Dirt-ee Allen-bee … with some affection, I might add. There are some names that lend themselves to taunting rhyme. You were not called Dirt-ee with any affection whatever, judging by the condition of your backside. I want to know who thrashed you and I want to know why it was done.”
