by M. J. Trow
‘Maxie!’ Asheton threw his arms around the Head of Sixth Form. ‘You old fox. It’s been centuries!’ And they stood there, slapping each other’s backs like idiots.
‘Who is this ravishing creature?’ Maxwell asked. ‘If you tell me it’s Mrs Asheton, I’m going to kill you.’
‘Veronica, I’d like you to meet Peter Maxwell, historian, wit, raconteur. He used to be something of a film buff way back when.’
‘Still am, dear boy.’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Paul Getty’s always ringing up to borrow the odd vid.’ He shot a glance in Bingham’s direction. ‘Veronica,’ he kissed her hand, ‘the pleasure’s all mine.’
She purred at him.
‘The gang’s all here,’ Maxwell said, ‘or at least some of them. Jacquie.’ He waved her over. Policewoman Carpenter was between a rock and a hard place. It had taken her all of ten seconds to discover that Janet Muir was a prize bitch and she wasn’t sorry to be called away. On the other hand, she felt, as any woman would, the poor relation standing alongside Veronica.
Maxwell introduced them. ‘Jacquie Carpenter, my ol’ mucker David Asheton and … Veronica.’
Jacquie smiled and raised her glass to them. ‘Come on, Veronica,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a drink while the boys reminisce.’ And Veronica slid her hand along Asheton’s sleeve before undulating across the room in Jacquie’s wake.
‘Not Mrs Asheton the First, I assume,’ Maxwell muttered to his oppo.
‘Not Mrs Asheton at all,’ Asheton muttered back. ‘Sex on a stick, Max, I assure you. No, Mrs Asheton the First is a raddled old bitch with a drink problem. The last time I saw her she was living in Slough with a struck-off doctor. He had the same problem. Mrs Asheton the Second …’
‘I don’t have all night, Ash!’ Maxwell laughed.
‘So be it.’ Asheton beamed. ‘Now that’s rather a little cracker you’ve got with you.’
‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Maxwell warned him. ‘You’re not pinching my girl again!’
‘You bastard!’ Asheton slapped him playfully round the head. ‘I wish!’
‘I remember Cranton, ’62,’ Maxwell told him.
The smile left Asheton’s face. ‘I thought we agreed we’d never bring that up.’
‘And I won’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘Not until the News of the World makes me an offer I just can’t resist. Drinky?’
‘I’d kill for one,’ Asheton said. ‘My God, and “pat, he comes”.’
‘Who’s Pat?’ Maxwell asked, turning as Asheton did to the new arrival on the stairs. ‘It’s not Sir Richard Alphedge, the great actor?’
‘Ah, takes one to know one, Max!’ Alphedge’s vowels were even more rounded, his tone stentorious and cocktail-shaking. He too had lost most of his hair. He gripped Maxwell’s hand and kissed him on both cheeks.
‘Gone French since we last met, Alphie?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Gone queer,’ Asheton grunted, and promptly got the same treatment. ‘Dickon, how the hell are you?’
‘Well, well.’ Alphedge beamed at them both. ‘Sad day, eh?’
‘Hmm?’ Asheton asked.
‘Halliards going under the bulldozer or whatever.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Asheton said. ‘Tragic, tragic.’
‘Oh, I’d like you to meet Cissie.’
Maxwell half expected to find a slim juvenile lead on the actor’s arm, knowing what he did about actors, but instead found a rather buxom lady in multicoloured silks.
‘Cissie.’ Maxwell kissed her hand. ‘Wait a minute …’
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I did it in that Morse episode where there’s all that kerfuffle at Lonsdale College.’
‘And we’ll sign the autographs later,’ Alphedge said, leading her away. ‘Never work with children or actresses, Maxie,’ he muttered. ‘Especially when one’s actress wife is more famous than oneself. Is there a bar?’
A gong sounded from nowhere and a rather menacing-looking maitre d’ announced that dinner was served. The Old Boys found their scattered partners and ambled towards the dining room.
‘Spotted dick, I hope,’ Alphedge shouted.
‘Haven’t you had that seen to yet?’ Asheton called back.
Jacquie’s eyes rolled skyward and Maxwell patted her arm. ‘When we get to the school song,’ he whispered, ‘just la-la-la it.’ He winked at her. ‘You’ll be all right.’
She almost stumbled at the sight that met them in the lobby. A tall man stood there, with a long Barbour coat and a broad- brimmed hat, dripping with the rain he’d brought in from the blustery night. He looked like Clint Eastwood.
‘Good God,’ Maxwell said. ‘Preacher?’
The tall man swept off his hat. ‘Peter Maxwell.’ He bowed low. When he straightened, there was a white collar at his throat.
‘Oh God.’ Maxwell hesitated. ‘You really are a preacher, then?’
‘Church of God’s Children,’ the tall man said.
‘Yes, well, we’re all God’s chillun.’ Alphedge, behind Maxwell, lapsed into his Al Jolson, waving his hands in the air.
‘Richard!’ Cissie scolded. There was something about the tall man’s eyes that told her he had no sense of humour.
‘Jacquie.’ Maxwell was looking at those eyes too. ‘I’d like you to meet John Wensley … er … the Reverend John Wensley.’ And Wensley solemnly shook her hand.
The grandfather clock they kept in the foyer for old time’s sake had long since struck one. Peter Maxwell’s left shoe lay at a rakish angle on Jacquie Carpenter’s bedroom carpet; his right snuggled against her bathroom radiator. His jacket hung nonchalantly on her chair and his body was sprawled on her bed.
‘So,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘You survived the first round.’
She smiled back. ‘It could have been worse,’ she said, easing off her earrings.
‘Undeniably,’ Maxwell acknowledged. ‘Quent could have been there.’
‘Isn’t he coming?’
‘Stenhouse told me he’d replied and seemed very keen. I expect something came up on the Dow Jones or whatever and he had to turn into Gordon Gekko for the night. I dare say he’ll show up tomorrow, red braces and all.’
‘What’s the itinerary?’
‘Well, you may or may not be pleased to know that it’s an all-chaps morning. We’re going to a funeral, or a wake, or both. We’re going to say our farewells to an old school. Stenhouse has wangled the keys out of the caretaker. You wouldn’t want to be there – to see grown men cry.’
‘I’ve got hair to wash,’ she said, kicking off a shoe and letting the blood flow back to her heels.
‘Or there’s the sauna. I hear the Graveney does an excellent colonic irrigation.’
She threw something at him.
‘I remember doing that in geography in the Upper Fourths,’ he told her. ‘The colonic irrigation of the Nile Delta. Got an A- for my map from old Bloxham just before we got him on to his war stories. Never did another stroke of geography.’
‘One of the Few, was he?’
‘Wrong war, my dear. He got dysentery at Harfleur before marching on to Agincourt.’
Jacquie gave him an old-fashioned look. You never knew with Peter Maxwell. She kicked off her other shoe, to join the first near the bed. She sat in front of the mirror at the dressing table and let her hair cascade over her shoulders.
‘Time for the mud pack and cucumbers,’ she said, looking at him.
Maxwell smiled and finished his Southern Comfort. ‘A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse,’ he said, and dragged himself off the bed. ‘You know,’ he bent down and kissed the top of her head, ‘I was the luckiest man there tonight.’
‘Oh?’ She arched an eyebrow at him, watching his face in the mirror. ‘I should have thought you’d have given that distinction to David.’
‘Ash?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, you mean Veronica?’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Nah,’ he decided. ‘Airhead.’ He lifted her gently by the shoulders and turned her round. ‘I like my women to understand what
I’m talking about,’ he said.
‘Your women?’ She widened her eyes. ‘And anyway, I don’t understand; not always.’
‘Nearly always is good enough.’ He laughed. ‘I asked Veronica to pass me the salt at one point and she had to reach for a dictionary.’
They heard the grandfather clock strike two, distant, as though in a dream. ‘That’ll be me away,’ Maxwell said, retrieving his shoes and his tie, before finding his jacket.
She stopped him. ‘I’m only next door, Max,’ she said, and she kissed him, a deep kiss, long and close. He held her at arm’s length. ‘What a coincidence,’ he said. ‘So am I.’
The dead man hung at the end of the rope, creaking slowly on its taut housings. One shoe had dropped with a thud, echoing through the empty hallway and the dark, dead corridor beyond. His hands dangled at his side, the fingers hooked as he’d fought for breath, a little away from his body, as though balancing as he walked on air. His head was at an odd angle with the knot of the noose behind his left ear, his eyes bulging in the darkness, trying to see through the night gloom. His tongue protruded obscenely through the clenched teeth and the peeled-back lips, his final gesture to the world.
Ahead of him the wrought iron of the first landing glowed eerily in the fitful moon. After the rain, a scattering of clouds sailed past the tall oriel window with its coat of arms and its school motto. No school song now; no rousing chorus roared until the rafters rang, but the slow, swinging creak of the rope and the moan of the wind on the lonely stair.
3
The dew was still heavy on the ground as six of the Magnificent Seven wandered the grounds they all knew so well. Maxwell had left Jacquie sleeping, grabbed some orange juice and coffee in the Graveney’s breakfast room and piled into Cret Bingham’s Galaxy.
‘Tom Wilkinson was killed there,’ Richard Alphedge remembered on their way over. ‘Back there, on that bend. Some stupid bastard in a juggernaut. Do you remember, Max?’
‘I remember hearing about it in chapel the next day.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘You could have heard a pin drop. The HM was steady.’
‘The HM?’ Bingham called from the driving seat. ‘Heart of stone, that man. You don’t get tears from granite. My God, look at that.’
They had. Beyond the wild privet, tipped silver in the fading frost, the sweep of Halliards hung like a ghost in the morning. The Galaxy snarled through the open wrought-iron gates, the gilded arms peeling now in the autumn weather, in the twilight of their years. To the left, the concrete block that was the science lab, new in the Seven’s time, its walls corroded and grey. To the right, the bulk of the chapel and the Old School beyond. Matthew Arnold would have been at home here.
‘Parking under the limes, Anthony?’ Maxwell clicked his tongue. ‘Old Gregson’ll get you.’
‘Old Gregson!’ Muir laughed. ‘Now there’s a name I’d forgotten. Groundsman extraordinaire.’ Their minds raced back to the surly old sod they all swore had been drummed out of the Cheka for excessive inhumanity.
‘And bastard by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.’ Asheton chuckled. ‘It was you who turned the hose on the First Eleven Square, wasn’t it, Max?’
Maxwell drew himself up to his full height. ‘That is a gross calumny, sir, and you will withdraw it.’
‘Not very good at withdrawing, old Ash.’ Muir grunted and laughed as the blond man cuffed him round the ear.
Then an odd silence fell as the Galaxy crunched to a halt on the gravel, each man alone with his thoughts. The Preacher was out first, gazing up at the school chapel with its Gothic crosses and its stained glass. Somebody had put the Head of Classics’ bike up on that roof once, a miracle of engineering, ingenuity and schoolboy pluck. Alphedge took in the fives court wall and the workshops beyond, looking oddly derelict and silent, like a concentration camp. He remembered the stage with its worn, scarred surface and that indefinable smell in the wings, born of greasepaint and first-night nerves.
‘Do they still do woodwork and stuff in school, Max?’ he asked.
Maxwell gave him a faraway look. ‘When I looked last,’ he said, ‘it was called Design Technology – or was it Craft, Design Technology? You can’t give the little darlings a hammer or they’ll bash their thumbs and sue the county.’
‘Or kill each other.’ Muir slammed the door behind him.
‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I teach Peter Sutcliffe Appreciation classes every Thursday.’
‘Thursday!’ Alphedge dashed on to the dewy grass. ‘I remember Thursday. CCF!’ And he broke into a brisk march, swinging his left arm while his right held his rifle butt at the carry. He sang out the monotonous notes of the parade ground.
‘God, yes,’ Bingham groaned. ‘That bloody bugle. Weren’t you something in the CCF, Max?’
Maxwell nodded. ‘Company deserter.’
‘That’s right.’ Muir clicked his fingers. ‘Didn’t you ask Captain Bashford if you could form a cavalry arm?’
‘And didn’t he cane you to within an inch of your life for impudence?’ Asheton joined in.
‘Yes on both counts,’ Maxwell confessed.
‘Bingham laughed. ‘Mad as a bloody snake.’
‘Oh, God. Look at that.’ They followed Alphedge’s finger to what was once the pool. The cold blue water had gone now, as had the roars of the house-mad crowd, cheering home the swimmers. The rectangle, with its peeling pale blue plaster, was full of debris, brick, glass and timber.
‘You know what that is, don’t you?’ Bingham asked.
‘The cricket pavilion.’
They turned to look at the Preacher. It was the first time Wensley had spoken that morning.
‘God, he’s right.’ Instinctively, their eyes came up to the distant line of cedars looming in the grey of the morning. It had stood there, by the far hedge, where Asheton made small talk with the stragglers from Cranton, the girls’ school down the road, who were going through the motions of cross-country; where Bingham had thrown up most of the smoke from his first cigarette; where Quentin had rammed home the hundred that took the Public Schools’ Cup from Rugby that year.
‘God, it’s like a grave,’ Bingham said. ‘I’m not sure I can face going inside.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Maxwell told him. ‘It’s why we came. Why we all came. Stenhouse, got the key?’
Muir had. They crossed the grass in front of the old Tuck Shop, padlocked now, but with most of its windows gone. How many iced buns, Maxwell wondered, how many packets of hamburger-flavoured crisps had disappeared down his ravenous maw before the world had invented E numbers and cholesterol? Then their shoes were clicking on the flagstones where the local town crier had stood all those years ago, looking a prat in his stockings and tricorn hat, to grant them their half-day holiday in honour of something or other that everybody had forgotten; probably it was International Doo-Dah Day. They wandered into the darkness of the cloisters, where dog-eared papers still flapped on their rusty drawing pins. Maxwell tried to read the faded notices. The Shakespeare Society was to meet on Wednesday. There was house cricket practice on the West Field. The orchestra was to meet for rehearsals in Gatehouse Lodge at four-fifteen.
‘Sorry, Preacher,’ Muir called back to the tall man at the back of the meandering line. ‘I don’t have a key to the chapel.’
Wensley glanced to his right and ran his finger lightly over the carved oak of the doors.
‘Didn’t you sing falsetto in the choir, Dickon?’ Asheton asked Alphedge.
‘Only until gravity and nature combined to lower my testicles, dear boy. And anyway, it’s called treble. I, of course, had perfect pitch.’
‘“A perfect pitch and a blinding light,”’ Maxwell misquoted, but Newbolt’s poem was lost on these scholars of yesteryear. Muir’s key grated in the side-door lock. They stood, the six, staring down the long corridor ahead, the massive water pipes dark with dust.
‘I’m sorry there’s no light,’ Muir said. ‘All the power in the place was switched off last month.’ They h
ad to rely on the gleam from the high windows overhead.
‘Jesus,’ Asheton moaned. ‘It’s as cold as a witch’s tit in here,’ and he watched his breath smoke out.
They heard their footfalls echo as they ambled past the cream-painted walls and the silent classrooms with their half- frosted windows. Somehow, impossibly over the years, the old indefinable smell was still there.
‘In Latin lessons,’ Muir’s voice was dark brown, ‘no one can hear you scream.’
They all remembered the rows of ancient photos that once lined these walls. Faces long dead had stared back at them beneath tasselled, gold-laced caps and above striped jerseys. The First Eleven, the First Fifteen, Boxing Team A and Boxing Team B. The fives teams had been there and the Rowing Eight, proud and haughty and sure of themselves and their world. Then had come the Great War and the names of those who perished were gilded in the locked sanctums of the chapel. Bastard, E.F.L., Featherstonehaugh, B.F., Golighty, A.J.S., all lying together in foreign mud to prove there was a corner of a field that was forever Halliards.
‘The bell!’ Alphedge shouted. ‘I used to ring it when I was a prefect. Race you for it!’ And he shot off down the corridor, leaving the others in his wake.
‘Not bad for an out-of-work luvvie,’ Bingham commented, ‘that turn of speed.’
Alphedge had spun on his heel in a pool of light at the bottom of the central staircase. In profile to the others, his jaw had dropped and his fists had clenched. To the Preacher, it seemed that the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end.
‘Oh, my God.’
Asheton laughed. ‘Don’t tell me. They’ve carpeted Big School.’
But Alphedge wasn’t looking at Big School. He had his back to it, as they all knew, as Asheton should have known. One by one they reached him, and one by one they saw what he had seen. The body of a man twirled in the updraught, a half a twist to the left, another to the right, like some demented Newton’s cradle in Hannibal Lecter’s study.
‘Who is it?’ It was Bingham who gave voice to the question rising to all their throats.
‘It’s Quentin.’ The Preacher saw it first, mounting the worn stone of the steps so that he was on the dead man’s level.
