Different Class (25 page)

Meanwhile, Bob Strange has teamed up with Ms Buckfast on a plan to improve security. Henceforth, all visitors to the School will have to wear a name tag, and sign a special register. There is also talk of police checks for all ancillary staff, with the likelihood that staff members, too, will be subject to the same scrutiny. Bob Strange has been dreaming of this ever since he became Third Master, and his adoration of Ms Buckfast has now reached such a level of sycophancy that he leaves a trail of slime behind him whenever he is with her.

As if that wasn’t enough, Devine has discovered that there are mice in the Bell Tower. Contrary to my live-and-let-live approach, which has served me well over thirty-odd years, he has therefore decided – on Health & Safety grounds, of course – to purge the whole Upper Corridor of its rodent population. A sensible man would understand the limits of his authority, but Devine is not a sensible man, especially when he is competing with a promising upstart like Markowicz.

Markowicz has a rodent-free room, so Devine must have one too, regardless of the fact that Devine’s room is in a part of the building dating back to the eighteenth century and filled with eccentric conduits, blocked-up chimneys and hollow walls, which make infestation by rats, mice, cockroaches and other assorted vermin not only probable, but downright inevitable.

‘You see, Roy,
this
is the reason we don’t eat in our form-rooms,’ he said as he delivered the news to me this lunchtime in room 59, his sensitive nose twitching with ill-concealed complacency. Of course, with impeccable timing, he’d caught me in the act of dispatching a furtive ham-and-cheese sandwich between Registration and afternoon school, and the look on his face suggested that he considered this kind of depravity to be the source of all our ills.

‘One sandwich,’ I said, brushing the crumbs into the inkwell on my desk.

‘Food attracts vermin,’ said Dr Devine. ‘We’ll have to put down poison bait.’

There was no point in trying to argue with him that the stench of dead mice inside the walls is far worse than the presence of living ones. Dr Devine was adamant: the mice must go. I resigned myself. When Devine gets the bit between his teeth, nothing short of physical violence will wrest it from him. I furtively transferred the bag of Liquorice Allsorts from my desk to the pocket of my tweed jacket. That’s where it will have to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.

I finished the afternoon’s classes with a renewed sense of
Weltschmerz
(it’s no coincidence, I feel, that Devine’s adopted language throws up so many of these melancholy concepts, unknown to the more civilized Romans). My fourth-form was listless and uninspired; even my Brodie Boys did not display much of their usual joie-de-vivre. Allen-Jones had a torn shirt and looked even more unkempt than usual; Tayler had a hacking cough. Thanks to Dr Blakely, Anderton-Pullitt’s ‘special needs’ have evolved to include a dispensation from Latin altogether, while he concentrates on what he prefers – generally Maths and Science. I do not
miss
him, precisely, but when a disinclination to learn becomes a reason to stop doing so, the floodgates of Chaos are opened. I’ve tried to explain this to Dr Blakely, but Dr Blakely is adamant. Anderton-Pullitt’s condition, he says, needs a specialist approach. Apparently a forty-odd-year career of dealing with boys does not meet this requirement.

And so, during the last lesson of the day, feeling less than lustrous, I gave the boys a translation from Vergil to do in test conditions, while I rested my eyes behind a copy of the
Telegraph
. I was still resting them at five o’clock, when a sound of clanking buckets roused me from my somnolence, and I opened my eyes to discover that the fourth-formers were all gone, and that it was getting dark.

Winter was at the classroom door, carrying his bucket and mop. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d gone home.’

‘It’s all right. I was just – resting my eyes.’ I sat up, adjusted my waistcoat and tried to look alert.

Winter gave me a curious look. ‘Long day?’

‘Long? Only about thirty years.’

I stood up too quickly. The room began to spin, and I had to steady myself by putting a hand on my desk. The air smelt of disinfectant and boys, and there was chalk on the desk-top. Which is just as it should be, I thought: how can a man call himself a schoolmaster if he doesn’t have chalk under his fingernails, fire in his belly and a pounding head at the end of the day?

‘
Homines, dum docent, discunt
.’

‘A man – learns – as he teaches?’ ventured Winter cautiously.

‘That’s right,’ I told him. ‘Seneca.’

I have to admit, I was surprised. It’s not every day you come across a cleaner who knows Latin. But Winter is a far cry from Jimmy Watt, the Porter. For a start, he is intelligent – I can tell that from his voice and by the way he expresses himself. And he
sees
things – my fatigue, my anger with the management – that even my colleagues do not see.

‘But who teaches the teachers?’ he said.

Certainly not men like Markowicz, I thought, or administrators like Thing One and Thing Two: stuck all day in their offices, going on courses every week, drinking their coffee from the Headmaster’s cups and having as little to do with boys as possible.

‘Who, indeed?’ I said.

He smiled. His smile is curiously endearing, although there is something odd there, too. He reminds me of a boy I once taught, a quiet, self-possessed young man called Joseph Apple, who, ten years after leaving St Oswald’s, raped and stabbed a girl of sixteen, before lapsing into a fugue state from which he never recovered. I’m not sure why my cleaner should remind me of that troubled young man, but there’s something in his eyes that seems to look into the shadows. Or maybe I’m just imagining it. After all, I have shadows of my own.

‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn.’ His voice was slightly hesitant, and once again I wondered whether he’d stuttered as a boy. ‘But I know how you feel about the Honours Boards being taken down, and I thought perhaps you ought to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘They’re stacked up outside the Porter’s Lodge. I think they’re going to get rid of them.’ Once more, Winter looked awkward. ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to know. But a hundred and fifty Honours Boards take up a lot of storage space. And I heard the Head talking to Jimmy Watt—’

I stood up. ‘What did you hear?’

He shrugged. ‘I got the impression he meant to sell them to a building merchant. You know, those people who reclaim things from condemned buildings and churches? There’s quite a market for old school memorabilia. They use them for theme pubs and things like that.’

‘
Theme pubs?
’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I expected you to be able to do about it.’

I frowned at him. ‘Why do you care? You were never a pupil here.
Were
you?’ I suppose I was remembering last year’s
Mole
, whose initial devotion to St Oswald’s had turned into an obsessive desire for revenge.

Winter shook his head. ‘I suppose I’m just sentimental. Those boards belong to St Oswald’s. They don’t belong in a theme pub.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I said. Then I had a brainwave. ‘Do you have a car?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then – shall we call it – fifty quid?’

His eyes lit. ‘That sounds reasonable.’

And that was how Roy Hubert Straitley became a felon. I, who had never even failed to bring back a library book on time, did knowingly and without remorse initiate the theft of a hundred and fifty Honours Boards, removed from the back of the Porter’s Lodge in batches of a dozen or so, and transported in Winter’s car to the basement of my house in Dog Lane, while I treated the Porter, Jimmy Watt, to a few rounds of drinks at the Scholar by means of a diversion.

I’d thought it would be difficult. In fact, it turns out that committing a crime is surprisingly easy. My accomplice did all the heavy work of stacking and unstacking the boards; I paid for Jimmy’s drinks (and two of Bethan’s ploughman’s lunches), and then I paid off Winter in cash and returned to Dog Lane for cocoa and a slice of pie, feeling at the same time victorious and a little uncomfortable.

Yes, I have crossed a line. Strangely, I feel no different. In fact, I feel better than I have felt since the first day of term, when Johnny Harrington arrived to steal our past and our peace of mind. Those Honours Boards were not his to sell. I stole them from a criminal. And if the necessity arises, I shall steal
all
of St Oswald’s, board by board, stone by stone, rather than let the upstart win.

The cocoa was pleasantly warming. I drank it in front of the living-room fire, reading Harry’s journals and looking up from time to time at the object which had been his last gift to me, still sitting on my mantelpiece. Then I played his record again, and remembered the look on Devine’s face as he told me about the garden gnome that had haunted him throughout that term, popping up unexpectedly in his locker, on his desk, behind the wheel of his car, even outside his front door at midnight on a Saturday—

That gnome. Poor, hapless Dr Devine. He had tried every means of exorcism. First he tried throwing the figure away. When that didn’t work, he threw it out of his Bell Tower window (in defiance of all Health & Safety) to smash on to the cobbles far below. But Harry Clarke had access to an unlimited number of duplicates, because the moment one gnome was purged, another emerged to take its place; an army of leering minions, their single weapon ridicule.

Dr Devine’s annoyance grew – along with his discomfort – as gnome after gnome popped its impudent head out from stock cupboard and locker room; from briefcase, bookshelves and flower beds, sometimes wearing a House tie, sometimes bearing a label –
Peripatetic Gnomad, Gnomic Utterance
or simply
Human G-gnome
.

I suspect that there was something about the relentlessness of the assault that made my colleague uneasy. He’d never had much of a sense of humour, and he mistrusted anything he saw as proof of irrationality. Men of Devine’s ilk pride themselves on their common sense; they do not recognize the joys of the absurd and the meaningless. Devine disliked Harry Clarke because he saw him as a bad influence, encouraging boys to waste their time discussing pop music instead of Prep; studying Edward Lear in class instead of William Wordsworth; wearing elbow patches on his tweed jackets and failing to don his academic gown for Assemblies. In Devine’s book, this made Harry Clarke a sloppy, unprofessional teacher. In mine, he was an original; refreshingly unconventional; blessed with ideas and values that were decades ahead of his time.

Harry called boys by their first names at a time when no one else did this; which, far from undermining discipline, seemed actually to enhance it. Harry believed individuals ought to be treated as such, and made an effort to know as much about the boys in his care as he could. Worse still, Harry encouraged those boys to see
him
as a human being; even inviting them to his house at weekends and after School. The reason Harry’s Laughing Gnome had remained an ongoing joke for so long was that every boy in Harry’s form was privy to it and part of the plan. That’s twenty-nine boys, each with a gnome, each one with instructions of military precision on when and where to position it next for maximum disruptive effect.

Yes, it was ridiculous. Yes, it was juvenile. But when, on the last day of Michaelmas term, Devine came into his form to find twenty-nine gnomes sitting on desks in front of twenty-nine grinning boys, the mad surge of laughter that ensued was enough to lift the lid off the sky and allow the blaze of the sun to shine through.

I heard it from my form-room; the Old Head from his office; and Harry Clarke, in the Bell Tower, gave his boyish, open grin. It had been a cold, dark term. But just then, for a moment, all the world was in sunlight.

Once more I looked up at the mantelpiece. Harry’s last gift to me grinned back, the paint a little faded now, but the gleeful expression unchanged.

Use it well
, says Harry’s note. I mean to do him justice.

3

December 1981

Dear Mousey,

So what with the fuss about Poodle, I’ve had to put some of my plans on hold. Most of that’s due to my parents, who, on learning of his Condition, wanted to know
exactly
how close I was to Poodle, and what kind of things he’d said to me.

Now they keep trying to introduce me to nice girls from Church (nice girls from Church, like Becky Price), in case being queer could be catching. I wish they’d stop. It’s embarrassing. What happened to Platonic love? Why does it always have to be about s
ex
?

And then there are the little talks: talks about friends, and girls, and school, and if anything’s ever happened to me at school that made me feel uncomfortable. I thought about saying:
My teacher’s queer. He likes to put his hand on my leg and touch me through my trousers.
That would make them both sit up. They might even believe me. They’d certainly take it to the Head, and to the Board of Governors, and even maybe to the police. But then they’d take me out of school, and I’d never see Harry again.