Maxwell’s Flame

by M. J. Trow

‘Well, we have to be at the Carnforth Conference Centre by twelve. Check into our rooms, lunch, ice-breaking sessions and then into the nitty-gritty, as they say.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell rubbed a thoughtful chin. ‘What is the nitty-gritty of GNVQ exactly?’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Sally said. ‘I really called by to offer you a lift.’

  ‘A lift?’

  ‘Well, surely you’re not going to cycle?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Good God, Max, it’s the best part of seventy miles.’

  ‘Kent, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Garden of England.’

  ‘It’s just off the A259 before you get too lyrical about it.’

  ‘So what are you proposing?’

  ‘Well, how if I pick you up, say, ten?’

  ‘Ten is fine,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘What does Alan think of all this?’

  ‘Oh,’ Sally groaned, ‘my dear husband is up to his eyes in some vital contract or other. I’ve barely seen him for two weeks. I doubt if he’ll notice I’ve gone.’

  ‘Now then,’ Maxwell growled sternly. ‘I won’t have any lip-quivering in chauffeuses in my employ. Alan’s got a wife in a million. You know it. He knows it. Come to think of it, now we all bloody know it. Let’s forget husbands, and wives and whatever the hell GNVQ is and do what we enjoy best.’

  ‘Oh?’ She raised a searching eyebrow. ‘And what might that be?’

  He leered at her, winked, then dropped the smile entirely. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘character assassination, of course. Now, take that bastard Roger Garrett for instance. Do you know what he had the brass neck to say to me this morning?’

  Jim ‘Legs’ Diamond passed Peter ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell in the corridor the next day. Maxwell was feeling fairly flippant. He’d had a nice long chat with Sally Greenhow the night before and he’d finished all the dark blue bits on Lieutenant Fitzgibbon’s uniform after she’d gone. Every time he had to mix the blue and black, he cursed whatever bugger it was who chose that colour for the Light Cavalry over a century and a half ago. Whoever it was, he was clearly no respecter of Humbrol paints. And as Maxwell was feeling flippant, he thumped his left breast with his right fist as Roman soldiers were wont to do to their superior officers. It was the only token of respect that Peter Maxwell ever showed to Jim Diamond.

  In his turn, Diamond had had a sleepless night. Whenever he looked at the electronic green digits on his bedside clock, it seemed to say only ten minutes later than when he’d looked the last time. And whenever he felt himself dozing, he saw the hair-fringed face of his Head of Sixth Form smiling at him, like Death in The Seventh Seal. Why had he given in? Roger Garrett, Diamond’s Second Deputy, had warned him that Maxwell appeared not to have noticed the INSET week. And the content of that week – the introduction of a new vocational course for sixth-formers – was bound to be so alien to Maxwell’s outlook as to be unbelievable. It was rather like introducing a plesiosaur to an Apple Macintosh. Yet, the Great Man, after an initial outburst which did some structural damage to the Head’s office, had backed down. Acquiesced. And here he was, this Thursday morning, beaming and bashing his chest for some reason.

  Only then did it occur to Diamond that perhaps his Head of Sixth Form wasn’t well. It was increasing, wasn’t it? The stress factor? You heard stories all the time. So-and-so at Weldon High bursting into tears in a French lesson; Whatsisface from Burnside taking all his clothes off and wandering the Physics labs. Well, why not Maxwell? After all, there had been all that unpleasantness last year when Jenny Hyde had been murdered. And Jenny was one of Maxwell’s own sixth form. It was bound to take its toll, a thing like that. And Jim Diamond found himself glancing back at the retreating figure in the lightweight Italian suit and the desert boots, watching for any further signs of impending insanity.

  ‘Hectorina …’ Maxwell waved a small sheaf of papers at the gawky girl whose gaze never met his. ‘Not a bad effort, dear, but I think you’ll find that the affectionate name for the British Army’s musket was Brown Bess. Black Bess on the other hand, which you have here in your otherwise tolerable essay, was Dick Turpin’s horse.’

  The Upper Sixth guffawed. ‘Not to worry, Hectorina dear. Colour-blindness comes to us all. Richard …’ He fixed his grey gaze on a rugger-hearty slouched in the corner. At least he would have been a rugger-hearty if Leighford High School had boasted a rugger team. ‘Your conceptualization is inherently cogent. Unfortunately, you haven’t the first bloody clue what a paragraph is. Still, such niceties never severely challenged Jane Austen, so what the hell. And,’ he held aloft the final few sheets, having thrown Richard’s attempts back to the boy, ‘talking of hell, Miranda, your … thing.’ He held it between disdainful fingers. ‘You will write out twenty million times, “Apostrophes do not occur before every single letter’s’ in the English language.” Apart from that, I’ve never seen Wellington’s problems in the Peninsula outlined so succinctly. Bravo. Now, my children, list to me,’ and he swept past the photo of A.J.P. Taylor he’d stuck up in the corner years ago so that the Upper Sixth could throw darts at it. ‘Your revered A level teacher is going away.’ There were cries of ‘Shame’ mixed with ‘Hooray’. ‘Going away into that sweet good night – actually to the Carnforth Conference Centre, Lydd. Now, I know what you’re thinking, dearly beloved. Why is the old fart buggering off for a week when we’ve only got – how many contact days is it, Zak? You are, after all, doing A level Maths?’

  ‘Er … including today …’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell stopped him, ‘never include today what you can put off till tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, then. Twenty-six.’

  ‘Precisely. Twenty-six. Minus the five I’ll be away. Twenty-one. The European legations at Peking held out for over twice that time against the Boxer hordes. You’ll be all right. And who better to conduct you through the labyrinths of Napoleon’s domestic policy but your own, your very own, Mr Paul Moss, the Head of History.’

  Maxwell’s rapturous build-up fell on stony ears. After all, this group had the rising star that was Paul Moss for British History. The thought of having him for European History as well, even for one week, raised thoughts of suicide in their young breasts.

  ‘When I come back, however,’ Maxwell warned, ‘you’d better be ready for the most intensive three weeks of your young lives. Now, Hectorina, what part of Napoleon’s anatomy went on sale – and failed to reach its reserve – at Sotheby’s a few years ago? Let me give you a clue – it was about an inch long and had turned rather black.’

  2

  The A259 takes you most of the way, with the sea on your right and the sweep of the downs to your left. You pass within an arrow shot of that gentle rise where Duke William beat the hell out of the English on a misty October afternoon a long, long time ago; near Bodiam with its fine, fourteenth-century castle reflected in its emerald moat; through Guestling Thorn and Icklesham to Winchelsea.

  ‘Cinque port,’ Maxwell yelled above the wind and rattle of Sally Greenhow’s 2CV. ‘Of course, the medieval town lies out there, in Rye Bay. Rather like drowned Lyonesse, isn’t it?’

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you, Max,’ the girl said, crunching her gears badly, as she negotiated her way past a geriatric in a Rover, ‘that you are something of a Town Bore? How do you know all these things about places? You’ve only got a bike.’

  ‘Ah, but White Surrey and I have been places together you wouldn’t believe. Is it me, or are we a touch tetchy this morning?’

  Sally shook herself. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Max,’ she said. ‘PMT I suppose. That and Friday.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘PMT. It used to mean Penge Mean Time in my day.’

  ‘When was that, exactly?’ she humoured him.

  ‘The 1840s,’ he said, ‘when men were men and women weren’t. There’s a Martello tower up the road a bit.’

  ‘Where do we go then? After Rye, I mean?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘No, Max,’ she rumm
aged with the crumpled paper on his lap, ‘you’re reading it upside down.’

  ‘Oh, Sussex,’ he said, as though he’d been visited on the Damascus road. ‘Well, you either keep to the A259 across Walland Marsh or you hug the coast along Camber Sands. That way you come to the delightful sewer system of Jury’s Gut.’

  ‘Mmm, nice. And where’s Carnforth in relation to that?’

  ‘On the Lydd Level, mercifully just outside the bit marked “Danger Area” on the map.’

  ‘Dangerous for what, do you think? Bastard!’ and she raised a sudden middle finger to a meandering agricultural vehicle driver.

  ‘Woman driver, I shouldn’t wonder.’ Maxwell smiled smugly.

  She scowled at him behind her tinted glasses. ‘You’re looking early retirement in the face,’ she said, pursing her lips, ‘what with the injury and all.’

  ‘What injury?’

  ‘The one I’m going to do you if you make that sort of sexist comment again.’

  And apart from the crashing of Sally’s gears and the odd stifled chuckle from Max, the rest of the journey was silent, like the ‘p’ in Bath.

  It was an odd place perhaps for a conference centre, out of the way of the world, off the Dengemarsh road. To the north-east stood the low, rather menacing pile of Camber Castle, one of the ruins that Cromwell didn’t knock about, even a bit, but time had done more damage. English Heritage had got their worthy little hands on it however and in time, no doubt, its great Henrician gates would open to a rather bored world once again and the Japanese would have a field day with their cameras. To the south-west, the flat expanse was dotted with standing water and the newly opened holiday camps, with their trickle of May Bank Holiday visitors who had the leisure to stay on. Beyond the levels of the RSPB reserve, stretching to the shingle and the sea, where curlews, little terns and tiny firecrests nested in the open weather, the huge sinister blocks of Dungeness A and B loomed over the little lighthouse that Samuel Wyatt built there in 1792. The nuclear power stations stood like invading aliens on a submissive, battered landscape, crisscrossed and scarred with war.

  ‘Very H.G. Wells,’ mused Maxwell, but Sally was already taking them around the broad sweep of the drive into Carnforth and she missed the significance of it.

  Maxwell was glad to stretch his legs. They’d stopped for half-past tens-es in Bexhill, at a rather pretty little place with hanging baskets, but what with Maxie’s old trouble and Sally’s upturned pram of a car, standing upright again was pure joy. She helped him with the luggage – her three Samsonites to his one battered old case marked with a torn P&O label – and they staggered inside.

  The place was brand-new. There was no doubt about it, West Sussex Education Authority had coughed up splendidly. Wall-to-wall carpeting, electric sliding doors, plush leatherette furniture. If the rooms were as good as the foyer, they were in for a marvellous week – ‘Don’t forget to fill in your forms for subsistence every day,’ Margaret the school secretary had said. It certainly beat the hell out of the staff-room at dear old Leighford High, with its ashtrays and plastic trophies and piles of photocopying.

  ‘Good morning,’ a painfully breezy young thing hailed them both across the counter. She looked as though she had been taught the art of make-up by Pablo Picasso, in that her eyeshadow had missed her eyelids by several inches. ‘I’m Tracey. Welcome to Carnforth Conference Centre. We hope you have a nice stay. Will you sign the book, please?’

  Now Maxwell had a cleaning lady on his floor at Leighford High, the redoubtable Mrs B. (real name unknown), who had a similar habit of conducting conversation in blocks like this and Maxwell was a fair hand by now at handling it.

  ‘I knew you would be,’ he smiled. ‘Thank you so much. So do we. I’d be delighted.’ He held the pen, the one on the little chain anchored to the counter, out to Sally who flashed a smirk at him and signed.

  ‘You are?’ Tracey looked up in her pencil-pleated skirt. ‘Mr and Mrs Smith,’ Maxwell said. ‘I trust we have a south- facing room.’

  Tracey was still running her elegant, crimson-nailed finger up and down the visitors’ list when Sally came to her rescue. ‘It’s just my colleague’s little idea of a joke,# she said. ‘A very little idea, you’ll agree. I’m Mrs Sally Greenhow and my grandfather here is Mr Peter Maxwell.’ She stabbed him with the pen. ‘Sign, Max. And do try the joined-up writing this time.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Only the essentials of Sally’s conversation had reached the innermost recesses of Tracey’s mind. She’d found them both on the list. ‘From Leighford High School. For the GVNQ Conference.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Sally said.

  ‘I think she knows more about it than I do,’ Maxwell whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Would you like some tea or coffee? You will find it in the Whittingham Suite to your right. Is it?’ Tracey faltered. ‘Yes, I think it is. Sorry, I’m new.’ And she giggled.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I’m old.’

  ‘I’ll have your bags taken to your rooms,’ Tracey said. ‘Mrs Greenhow, you’re in 306. Mr Maxwell, 101.’

  ‘Oh, Christ no!’ Maxwell staggered at the bar.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Tracey looked at the old codger in some alarm. ‘Oh, no,’ she laughed. ‘It’s that telly programme, isn’t it? That bloke what has a different celebrity every week. That’s quite funny, that is.’

  Maxwell frowned at the girl. ‘1984,’ he said, softly, ‘George Orwell. And let me assure you, Tracey, there’s nothing remotely funny about Room 101.’

  Then he felt Sally dragging him away into the Whittingham Suite. Here was instant Victoriana. The windows were stained glass, the walls festooned with velvet and flock wallpaper that would have put a Chinese restaurant to shame. Plush furniture beckoned all around the room. Only the coffee and tea urns screamed 1990s – that and the spotty youth in the white jacket standing beside them.

  ‘What’ll it be, Mrs Greenhow?’ Maxwell asked in his best W.C. Fields. ‘What’s your poison?’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee, Max, black.’

  ‘Two coffees, please, one black. The other one normal,’ Maxwell beamed at the boy.

  Sally Greenhow was about to join the throng of coffee-drinkers milling in the centre of the room when someone clapped his hands and called them all to order.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Hello … I’m Gary and I’d like to welcome you to the Carnforth Conference Centre.’ Sally thought the young man something of a male clone of Tracey in Reception. To Maxwell, what with the short back and sides and a pale grey double-breasted suit, he looked like a Mormon.

  ‘We’re … nearly all here now, so could you make sure you wear these name badges and have a little chat before lunch, which will be served in the Hadleigh Room. We look forward to our ice-breaking session after lunch. Oh, just one thing. Could the vegans among you see Antonio, who is your chef for the week.’

  ‘Vegans!’ muttered Maxwell in horror. ‘God, Sally, what have you brought me to?’

  ‘Hello!’ A rather mannish lass in lace-up brogues and a severe fringe spun round with hand extended. She’d already pinned her badge to her lapel. ‘I’m Valerie, Richard de Clare School, Birmingham.’

  ‘Oh, bad luck.’ Maxwell shook her hand and felt his tarsals scrinch. ‘Peter Maxwell, Leighford High.’

  ‘Leighford? Where’s that?’ Valerie’s lipstick had somehow smeared itself over her front teeth.

  ‘Just follow the yellow brick road,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘straight on till morning.’

  ‘Please ignore him, Valerie,’ Sally cut in. I’m Sally Greenhow, regrettably from the same madhouse as him.’ She jerked her head in Maxwell’s direction. ‘Max is here, you might say, under duress. I’m not sure you’ll get a co-operative word out of him all week.’

  ‘What is it you do, Valerie?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I teach,’ she said, rather surprised by the question.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Maxwell humoured her
, ‘but what?’

  ‘Oh, Business Studies,’ she said.

  ‘Would you excuse me?’ Maxwell enquired. ‘I’ve just seen a girder out there in the grounds and I do believe it’s rusting.’ And he wandered away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sally said. ‘He’s a cantankerous old sod, but he’s not usually so rude.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Valerie grinned. ‘I know what men are.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  Valerie turned rather a strange colour. ‘Oh, dear me, no,’ she said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Sally told her. ‘So you’re introducing GNVQ at your school in September?’

  ‘Well, we’re seriously thinking about it. Of course, it’s all about funding these days, isn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  Similarly pointless conversations such as these were going on all over the Whittingham Suite. It was always the same at educational conferences. Everybody talking rubbish either to impress somebody else or just because they were briefly free of that peculiar hell that most people call a classroom.

  Maxwell found himself gazing out of the window where the sun was sharp on the newly planted roses and a sprinkler system was already sparkling on the lawn. It hadn’t rained for a week. There was bound to be a hosepipe ban soon.

  ‘And we, who trespass now in Echo Fields,

  Called out and, heartless, broke the spell,

  And all the wounds which time has healed

  (As heal they can in Echo Fields)

  Reopened by us and the morning bell.’

  Maxwell almost dropped his cup. He stood there with his mouth open staring at the dark-haired woman who stood at his elbow.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she laughed, ‘tell me you’re Peter Maxwell or I’ll just die of embarrassment.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I’m Peter Maxwell. And you’re Rachel Cameron. Or were when we last met.’

  ‘King,’ she told him, ‘Mrs King.’

  ‘Ah.’ He found himself grinning stupidly. Then he felt her hand on his. ‘Max,’ she said. ‘Battling Maxie from all those years ago. Remember Midsummer Fair?’