Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  There was a knock at the open door.

  ‘Mr Maxwell.’ The Head of Sixth Form recognised the whine without turning round.

  ‘Miss Lacey,’ he beamed.

  ‘Have you got the master key for the lockers?’

  ‘You know perfectly well I have, Madeleine.’ He turned, continuing to smile at her like a basilisk. ‘On account of how you borrowed it on average three times a week last term. What happened to our little chat? Remember? The one where you said you’d turn over a new leaf and organize yourself this term, what with A levels being a few months away and all.’

  She grinned and let a giggle escape. Yes, that was it. The height of wit and repartee for Madeleine Lacey. Maxwell flicked open his lower drawer and threw her the key with the huge plastic tag that carried his name. ‘Straight back to me,’ he said, as he always did when he lent the thing out. ‘I should start charging.’

  In the corridor, the giggly girl all but collided with James Diamond, who looked at her disapprovingly and made a mental note to tackle Maxwell again on the appearance of his sixth form.

  ‘Max,’ he said, nodding at Alison and closing the door.

  ‘Headmaster.’ Maxwell gave his customary start-of-term bow. Its obeisance fooled no one. ‘Are you assembling this morning?’

  ‘In the library as usual. Ten minutes from now. Did you want a word?’

  ‘With the sixth form. Yes please. What with all this going on …’ He waved an exasperated hand to the cluster of people at the gate, where Roger Garrett was again attempting his King Cnut impression by stemming the overwhelming tide of modern journalism.

  ‘Just like King Cnut.’ Diamond must have read Maxwell’s mind, but Maxwell wasn’t at all sure he’d got the spelling right. ‘What a mess. And then …’ The Head turned the full focus of his gold-rimmed specs on his Head of Sixth Form. ‘I’d like to see you in my office.’

  ‘I am Inducting this morning, Headmaster.’

  ‘Can’t Alison do it?’

  They both looked at Maxwell’s Number Two, promoted above her level of incompetence because she happened to be in the right place at the right time. She thought of the prospect – ninety or so kids poised on the threshold of a dream, determined to ignore Maxwell’s advice about not wasting the golden year that was the Lower Sixth. They had a common room – of sorts – for the first time and free periods and coffee machines. Bliss-on-a-stick. She needed all that like a hole in the head.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said limply as though they’d asked her to climb the north face of the Eiger.

  ‘Good.’ Diamond was utterly unaware of the short-comings of his staff. Just as he was unaware of his own.

  All three of them made their way down to the library on the first floor. It wasn’t bad as libraries went, Dewey classifications largely hidden by geraniums and other exotica brought in by Miss Ratcliffe, stereotype of sterotypes who stood behind her counter in the term that was minutes old, tapping her feet and hating her job all over again. She loved books, but hated the people who read them.

  ‘Ravishing as always, Matilda.’ Maxwell winked at her as he swanned in with clipboard and lists.

  She scowled at him under her iron-grey thatch and twirled the rope of beads that secured her reading glasses in unguarded moments. Only Maxwell called her Matilda. No one else dared. To begin with, it wasn’t actually her name. She had explained that to him once, when she’d first got the job; as he told people, on the day when Hitler invaded the Low Countries. But he thought she looked like a Matilda, so Matilda it was.

  ‘How was Sittingbourne this year? Enervating as ever?’ He didn’t wait for a reply, but slammed down his clipboard and let rip with the stentorian roar for which he was famous. ‘Right, you shower. Let’s make a start, shall we?’

  The tumult subsided. Faces new and old turned to him. They all knew him. Some of them hated him perhaps, many of them loved him. But they all knew him. To them, and to the generations before, he was identified with the characters of the film-world they knew he loved. Knew because his lessons were full of it. No one except Geoffrey Smith, the Head of English, ever called him Maxim, after Laurence Olivier’s haunted character in Rebecca. That was because no one, not even Smith and Maxwell, was of that vintage any more. Maxwell had still been in nappies and his dad’s take-home pay £3 0s. 6d. a week when David O. Selznik released the film. Even now, though, when he thought about it, there was something of the sinister, deranged Mrs Danvers about the school librarian, glaring at some hapless child out of her upstairs windows. And the generation of sixth-formers had long gone who called him the Blue Max and identified him with the rather unpleasant character played by George Peppard as the First World War ace obsessed with the rather tacky enamelled medal. But there had been no film to replace Maxwell’s still current nickname among the sixth form. Although the dashing Mel Gibson had first hacked a bloody path through the bikeways of the future when the present lot were at playgroup, the epithet ‘Mad Max’ still clung to him in whispered common room conversations. He toned it down himself and on the last mufti-day they’d had, before the dead hand of Jim Diamond stopped those enchanting days when the school functioned as usual but everyone wore fancy dress, Maxwell had turned up in studs and leather with his hair standing on end and carrying a placard – ‘Beyond the Hippodrome’. His own youth culture and theirs woven into one.

  ‘Good morning.’ Diamond attempted to capitalize on the silence Mad Max had created with the indefinable something that made him the last of the dinosaurs.

  There was no reply. That was why Maxwell had never begun any address to kids like that. There never was a reply. Each one would talk to you individually; some chatty, some abrupt. Some might even bare their souls. But collectively? Never. All you got was a wall of silence. Except that Maxwell could get them laughing. Here was a man for all seasons who had lost his way in his own darkness and when he emerged, there was this unforgiving and inescapable rut.

  ‘Many of you will have noticed’, Diamond said, with no attempt to project, ‘that there are journalists outside school this morning. Obviously it’s about poor … er … Jenny Hyde.’

  Maxwell watched the Head’s audience. In particular, his gaze fell on Tim Grey, a sallow, unprepossessing youth, who ought to have been spotty, but wasn’t. The boy’s eyes fell. One or two of his mates glanced in his direction, then looked away. Then Maxwell found the pale, hard face of Anne Spencer and it puzzled him. He’d expected tears perhaps, a downturn of the mouth certainly. Instead he saw a look that unnerved him, a coldness in the eyes. He didn’t like it. But was fascinated by it and couldn’t look away.

  ‘It’s a tragedy of course,’ Diamond was mumbling, ‘especially to those of you who were her friends. But it’s also very delicate. The police enquiries are continuing. I know that some of you have talked to the police already. And I understand that they have more interviews to conduct. If these happen on school premises, I shall expect to be informed. You have a right to have your parents present at these interviews if you wish. On no account, however,’ he lifted his voice now to be heard over the rising muttering, ‘on no account,’ and he flashed a dark stare at Maxwell, ‘should you talk to the press. Certain journalists have a habit of twisting anything you say. It’s far better to say nothing. If anybody pesters you for information, tell a member of staff if it’s here in school time; or your parents if it’s outside school. Now, a moment’s silence, please, while we remember Jenny.’

  Maxwell had not been ready for this. He looked at Alison, whose eyes widened. Behind Diamond, the form tutors shifted uneasily. Geoffrey Smith pulled his head out of the Guardian and Matilda Ratcliffe stopped stamping.

  ‘How bloody fatuous,’ Maxwell thought. The time for all that was at the girl’s funeral. Now it seemed out of place, grotesque. Legs Diamond was not the sort of Headmaster to command silence, even for a minute. He was too new, too callow to take the bull by the traditional horns on Armistice Day and talk of the slow drawing-down of blinds. He
didn’t have the nerve for it and he didn’t have the heart. Only Diamond stood with his head bowed and long before the moment was up, the sixth form, with a collective mind of its own, began shifting and whispering. One of them was dead. And they were all on alien ground.

  4

  Six- or seven-year-old artwork still stood under glass in James Diamond’s office. Maxwell remembered the artist well. A promising graphic designer described by the Head of Art as a natural with a distinctive feel for form, she now put all her artistic talent into serving up Zingers and other incomprehensible tasties in the local Kentucky. Well, it was the way of the world.

  ‘You wanted a word, Headmaster?’ Maxwell had never seen Diamond so tight-lipped.

  ‘You talked to the press,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Look, do you mind if I sit down? The old knee isn’t what it was.’

  Minutes earlier, he’d seen Roger Garrett and Bernard Ryan scuttle out of the Head’s room to their respective offices. The triumvirate with their backs to the wall. They reminded Maxwell of a rather seedy version of Horatius and Co., although in this case the dauntless three weren’t keeping the bridge too well, all things considered. Maxwell was a past master at outmanoeuvring his opponents. Now, in order not to loom over him, Diamond had to sit down too and he had to shift a pile of papers from the chair in order to do it.

  ‘Why, Max?’ Diamond was trying the old pals approach. ‘Why did you do that? And to Tony Young of all people?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘He might split the odd infinitive,’ he said, ‘but we’ve all got to bend with the tide, Headmaster.’

  ‘Don’t get flippant with me, Maxwell,’ Diamond warned.

  The grey old plodder paused. Well, well, the worm had turned. All that Diamond had had going for him for some time was that he seemed a nice guy. Now, even that had gone. No more Mr Nice Guy.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Headmaster,’ Maxwell said, with the air of one who has never regretted anything in his life. ‘I merely wanted to know what everyone else seems to know.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Maxwell leaned back on the Head’s uncomfortable new furniture. ‘When Jenny Hyde died,’ he said, ‘Iwas away on holiday. I missed it all. The finding of her body. The immediate police enquiries. The funeral.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Did you go to the funeral?’

  ‘No.’ Diamond couldn’t outstare Mad Max for long and he glanced away. ‘I believe Janet Foster went.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘She’s a good form tutor, Janet,’ he said. ‘I’m glad she was there.’

  ‘But why Tony Young?’ Diamond persisted.

  ‘He covered the story for the Advertiser,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘Why didn’t you tackle the nationals? They were there too.’

  ‘Aha,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘I tried that once. When I was doing some research into the war, for the new GCSE History course. Not only was it impossible to find anybody who knew what I was talking about, I was expected to pay an astronomical sum to use their articles. The Advertiser was free.’

  Diamond got up, his face taut. He whipped a newspaper off his desk. ‘I take it you haven’t seen this?’

  Maxwell hadn’t. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Young’s lead story for this week’s Advertiser. He’s networked it all over the place. That’s why we’ve got those people out there. We might have got away with a quiet start to the term, Max, but you’ve made that impossible.’

  Maxwell’s face darkened as he read the proof. ‘I don’t like the tone of this,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think I do?’ Diamond snapped. ‘As soon as John Graham sees this, he’s going to want some answers, I can tell you.’

  Maxwell was unimpressed. John Graham was the Chairman of Governors, that group of ineffectuals the government had rocketed into a position of pre-eminence to keep an eye on the leftist teachers their paranoia led them to believe lurked in every classroom. He read on, frowning. ‘This makes it sound as if I’m some kind of ghoul,’ he muttered.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  Maxwell was suddenly on his feet, bad knee or not. ‘You sanctimonious bastard!’ he bellowed.

  He saw Diamond turn white, standing as they were toe to toe.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ was all the Head could manage.

  ‘One of my sixth form is dead,’ Maxwell said levelly.

  ‘My sixth form too,’ Diamond reminded him.

  ‘Is that so?’ Maxwell growled. ‘Then join me, for God’s sake.’

  Diamond turned to his desk and sat down heavily behind it, distanced from the gauntlet that Maxwell had thrown down. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘On some ludicrous quest?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maxwell leaned forward, gripping the desk with both hands, consciously invading Diamond’s space. ‘The Sangreal,’ he said, then realized he was talking to a physicist and thought he’d better explain. ‘The Holy Grail of truth, Headmaster. Out there,’ he pointed to the world beyond the glass, ‘is someone who put an end to a young life. Choked the breath out of a seventeen-year-old girl.’

  Diamond looked up at his Head of Sixth Form and said softly, with a wisdom he didn’t usually display, ‘Let it go, Max. Leave it to the police.’

  Maxwell straightened up, the fire dying in his eyes. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

  ‘They’re the experts,’ Diamond reminded him. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

  ‘I don’t dispute that,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Well, then

  Maxwell looked at him. What he was going to say would go over the Head’s head, but he said it anyway. ‘Do you know that poem by Mackintosh?’ he asked. “In Memoriam”.’

  ‘Er … no.’ Diamond had never been one for poetry. Maxwell knew that. It was because he had no soul.

  ‘He wrote it for a Private David Sutherland of the Seaforth Highlanders who was killed in a German trench in May 1916. There’s one verse that’s oddly sharp in my memory at the moment:

  ‘You were only David’s father,

  But I had fifty sons

  When we went up in the evening

  Under the arch of guns,

  And we came back at twilight -

  O God! I heard them call

  To me for help and pity

  That could not help at all.’

  Diamond was confused. ‘I don’t see …’

  ‘Mackintosh is making the point that he was closer to that dead boy than his own father, because he was there when he died. He was his officer.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Maxwell looked with contempt at the man behind the desk. ‘I was Jenny’s officer,’ he said softly. ‘Her Year Head.’

  ‘But you hardly knew her, surely …’

  ‘Hardly,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But what if,’ he was asking himself, really, ‘what if on the night she died she called to me? To anyone? Called for help and pity? There was no one to listen, was there? Well, I owe her that much. I’m listening now,’ he murmured, turning. ‘I was her officer.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell.’ Diamond was at his firmest as the man reached the office door. He paused. ‘You will not talk to the press again.’

  Maxwell turned to him, smiling. ‘I’ll see myself out, Headmaster.’

  Somebody – possibly a physics teacher, oddly enough – once analysed a teacher’s working day. Only a tiny portion of it was contact time, actually in a classroom with the kids. The rest was paperwork. It wasn’t only the police in the ’90s who were strangled in red tape. The world of the teacher was bureaucracy run mad. It wouldn’t be long before Roger Garrett would be pestering Maxwell for the necessary information for Form 7. How many girls under seventeen taking Maths and Science A level? How many boys? How many yellow socks? Who owned the zebra? Maxwell had long ago stopped asking why the Department of Education and Science should need all this stuff. And, come to think of it, why wasn’t it called the Department of Education and History? It was becoming a mad, mad world where everybod
y wore white coats.

  That morning, Maxwell got his contact time. The new intake, officially designated now Year 7, sat smiling in front of him, still crisp after two hours on the premises, bewildered, a little afraid. Eleven years old and already in the front line. He introduced himself, in the History room on the first floor that stood next to the library, and handed out small pieces of paper. Not for Mad Max the minutiae of the National Curriculum, that grey, flat concept in which each kid in the country would be doing the same lesson, from the same book, at the same pace.

  ‘I want you all’, he said, ‘to look very carefully at me.’

  They giggled.

  ‘This’, he turned to his left, ‘is my best side.’ Then to his right, ‘This is not quite so good.’ He turned his back on them. They were only first years, on their first day. He’d be all right. No knives in his back. He only got those in the staff room. ‘But this’, he showed them the back of his barbed-wire head, ‘is the best side of all.’

  The giggles grew into laughter. That’s it, Maxwell mused. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Make ’em do History – especially when it came to option time and they had to choose between that and the waste of time that was Geography.

  ‘Now,’ he faced them again, ‘I want you to write down on that bit of paper how old you think I am.’

  There were guffaws.

  ‘Do it properly.’ He held up his hand. ‘Look carefully. And try to get it right. ‘I’m the only one who does the jokes here. No conferring.’ He put on his best Bamber Gascoigne for them, although none of them had the remotest idea who Bamber Gascoigne was. Probably, in his heart of hearts, not even Bamber Gascoigne.

  He wandered the lines of desks. Next lesson, he knew, Paul Moss, his Head of Department, would be in the room. He’d reorganize it, get the kids working in groups, playing with computers. Doing everything ’90s educationalists expected. Until then, Maxwell would keep the desks in rows, where he could launch himself at each kid. And his computer was a blackboard, his cursor a piece of chalk. This year for the first time he’d had to buy his own. The school office had stopped providing it.