R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (66 page)

About a week later Nun Stratton-Forbes drove up in a black Austin Seven, a vehicle he managed to leave in the sidelong manner of a portly undertaker making an unobtrusive exit from a Rolls-Royce hearse. He looked like an undertaker, too, in black jacket, Homburg hat and owlish glasses, still fighting a losing battle with his squint. He made a businesslike entry, and after solemnly shaking hands told David he was in charge of the classics section of an old and reputable correspondence college. 'It has a bearing on why I'm here, sir,' he said. Alone among the Old Boys, Nun never addressed boy or master by nickname. 'My work brings me into touch with a variety of educational establishments and I have a suggestion you might like to consider. It relates to that leaflet you sent through the post. I've given it some thought, sir, and I can't help feeling the appeal might be canalised by the introduction of a more specific scheme, promising a far better yield.'

'Nun,' David said, chuckling, 'you always did make ten words do the work of two and you haven't changed a bit. What the devil are you driving at?'

'Geographical selection, sir.'

He unzipped his brief-case and produced a sheaf of tabulated cards. 'I did a trial scheme, sir. You see, Old Boys will be scattered all over the world and perhaps we have the addresses of several hundred of them.'

'Just under a thousand, I believe.'

'Well, then, of that total at least two dozen must be both centrally placed and
attached to the school. My idea, worked out in detail here, is to enrol those O.B.s as agents, each giving an undertaking to make personal contact with all the Old Boys in his immediate area. Most of them will be known to them and within travelling distance. People ordinarily throw postal appeals in the wastepaper basket, but no one dismisses the direct solicitation of an old friend. You could even work out a quota for each area. I'm based on North London and I'll be responsible for my district. I think I could undertake to raise three hundred, sir, either in covenants or direct subscriptions.' He looked at David mildly. 'Does the scheme recommend itself to you?'

'Nun,' said David, respectfully, 'you are Bamfylde's Carnot, organiser of victory. It's a brilliant idea. I could have sat here a month without producing anything half so good. Would you lend me those cards for a day or so?'

'Oh, you may keep them, sir. I prepared them with that in mind. And now, if you will excuse me, I must pay my respects to Mr Barnaby. He would be hurt to learn I had been here and left without giving him a progress report.'

'Barnaby will be delighted to see you, Nun. He regards you as his raison d'être for remaining in the profession,' and Nun quietly withdrew.

'Extraordinary chap,' David said aloud, as Grace wandered in, sketchbook tucked under her arm, and asked, 'Who, Daddy?'

'Nun Stratton-Forbes, whose first notable feat here was to present himself at the long-jump pit and announce your arrival. He's just made me a gift of the product of the tidiest mind we've ever had at Bamfylde. What have you got there today?'

She opened her sketch-book and showed him a water-colour of a scene looking north-east from the corner of the planty, painted, it would seem, in the course of a cricket match, for in the distance were strategically-placed blobs, representing two elevens and the umpire. It was very good, he thought, impressionistic but sufficiently defined to catch a fleeting moment of the Bamfylde scene on a May evening. 'Do you ever title your pictures, Grace?' he asked, and she said she called this one 'Close of Play', one of a series she had done on the school year.

'I'd like to have them some day,' he said. 'They say more than a photograph. I'll tell you what, if this represents summer do one for the other three seasons and we'll get them framed and mounted and hang them in the study.'

'Oh, I should have to talk to Spats about it,' she said. 'He's the only one who would know whether they were worth framing.' Spats, of course, was Winterbourne, who now paid them monthly visits. It struck David, for the
first time, that it was Grace, rather than Bamfylde, that prompted his twelve or more drives to and from London throughout the year. He said, teasing her, 'Has Winterbourne always been hot favourite, Grace?'

'Not really,' she replied, seriously, 'but he's always in the first two. Sax is the other.'

'Ah,' he said, 'you didn't have to tell me that. How about also-rans?'

'I should need pencil and paper for that,' she said, and, giving him a shrewd glance, 'Daddy… do I… I mean, is it absolutely a “must” for me to start as a weekly boarder at Challacombe Convent School, in September?'

'I'm afraid it is,' he said. 'Frankly, I'd much sooner you stayed here, for you're a real help to me these days, with the name of every Old Boy back to 1925 in your head, but we can't have you as the only girl in a school of three hundred boys. At twelve it's bad enough, for you've already got more courtiers than Gloriana. At sixteen the competition would be frightful. After all, it isn't as if you were a plain, puddingy miss, is it?'

She drifted over to the convex mirror above the fireplace and studied her distorted reflection. 'I look like one in this,' she said, 'and if it meant staying here, instead of spending Monday to Friday away, I wouldn't care if I
was
plain and puddingy.'

'You wouldn't have any courtiers then. Go and give Rigby a hand with the lunch.'

She went out and he stood thinking, one hand on the mantel shelf, the other still holding Nun's card-index. She was as much a part of the place, he thought, as Algy and himself, as integrated into the structure and texture of Bamfylde as Big School, the horse-roller and the planty, and the process had begun that autumn evening nearly six years ago, when he had lifted her from the taxi bringing her home from that convalescent home. He saw her now as his special bonus, something tossed him by the fate that had deprived him, in a moment of time, of Beth and her sister, Joan. She had come to represent all that part of his life between the plummeting descent of Beth's beret, from Colwyn Bay's pier, to the evening he stood on the plinth of the Founder's statue, taking his first roll-call as head. It would be a wrench to part with her, even for five days a week, eight months of the year, and if there had been a way of avoiding it he would have done it gladly, but there wasn't. She had to begin mixing with other girls, so that she began to think as a woman, and how was this possible so long as she remained here?

The bell clanged in the quad, the jangle reminding him of a parting shot of
Algy's, when they had been discussing plans for the new buildings. 'We'll have to crown that new wing with a bell tower,' he had said. 'We must be the only school of our size in the country that continues to regulate our comings and goings by that discordant clamour,' and when David had reminded him of the special status of school bell-ringer, acknowledged by all as long ago as Nipper Shawe's day, he said, 'We'll hold on to that. Imagine the status conferred on the chap who pulls the rope! We might even invest him with a ceremonial collarette, on the style of the Orange Order. Make a note of it, P.J., jot it down now, for these things count,' and he had.

2

The old terminal pattern reasserted itself, the memorable incident surfacing among the flotsam of the school year, so that he could always look back on a specific period and say to himself; 'That was the time of poor old Lackaknacker Briggs's abduction…' or, 'That was about the time we had trouble with Crispin', and so on down the seasons, down the terms, down the years.

The two highlights of his first full year centred on misfits, similar in many ways. And yet, in retrospect, the one was quite ridiculous and the other something that could have ended in tragedy, but for luck, and the lessons he had learned since his first day here.

Briggs was the first celebrity, a boy whose unfortunate nickname, 'Lackaknacker', dated from the day it was broadcast that he had had a malformed testicle removed as a child. Anyone but Briggs would have filed this away as top secret, for what could be more certain than that it would earn him instant notoriety? It was nothing serious, it seemed, no more than a trifling piece of surgery, performed upon his undistinguished anatomy years before he ever set foot at Bamfylde, but the moment news leaked it found its way into school legend, so that Briggs was dubbed 'Lackaknacker', or alternatively, 'One Stroke', and the wags got busy on rhymes concerning his affliction, the most popular being a chant that ran:

Mr Briggs is much improved
Since he had a sphere removed.
Shorn of passion, shorn of fire,
He now sings alto in the choir.

Most boys would have found the situation intolerable but somehow Briggs adjusted to it. Very easily, David would have said, for Briggs was an accomplished adjuster. You never found him out of humour and rarely out of mischief. Similarly, you never challenged him without hearing an excuse of marked originality. His excuses were, in fact, among the most original David had ever heard, and were offered with an air of innocence that exonerated him from any failing, save guilelessness. Briggs had the frank, slightly bemused expression of a cherub seen in a Renaissance painting, with blue, trusting eyes, heavy pendulous cheeks, a small, rosebud mouth, and no chin at all. A dullard at work, he was equally indifferent to games. Never once had he been known to catch a ball, or arrive anything but last in a heat over any distance, so that time would have hung heavily on his hands had he not possessed an inventiveness that led him into all manner of bizarre adventures during his rough passage through Lower School. The first, and possibly the most spectacular of these, was his alleged kidnapping that led to his acquisition of yet another reputation, that of Bamfylde's Baron von Munchausen, with a capacity for romantic lies that stunned the imagination. The story of Lackaknacker's abduction emerged at the time, of course, but the truth behind it had to be pieced together over the years, so that David, with an academic interest in such things, never got confirmation until Briggs himself admitted the facts as a returning Old Boy.

It all began with a raid upon Man Chilcott's orchard. Most of the farmers in the vicinity of the school had adjusted to the presence of some three hundred young savages, settled in their midst, but Chilcott, a particularly sour smallholder, never had, and for years maintained a running feud with boys who, for the sheer hell of it, would descend on his hen-roost and orchard.

It seemed that Lackaknacker was engaged in one of these forays when it happened – at least, that was his story when, tired and heel-blistered, he reappeared at school early one October morning, with a lurid tale to account for his overnight absence. He found Bamfylde alerted, despite the darkness of the hour before the dawn, for he had been missed at call-over, search-parties had been out and his parents had been notified by telephone that he would probably appear as a runaway on the milk train.

David saw that he was fed (he ate breakfast like a ravenous castaway), showered and sent to bed, after which he conferred with Barnaby, Briggs's housemaster, as to what should be done about him. Barnaby had already questioned him and rejected his bizarre explanation but confessed himself worried about
the boy and inclined to lay the blame on that piece of surgery, carried out when Briggs was at kindergarten.

'Damn it all, P.J.' he said, 'it can't be good for the chap's morale to have them chanting that obscene doggerel at him. You know how fiendishly cruel the juniors can be, and they've made hay over Briggs's missing equipment. I knew about it, of course. I've already warned Gosling, the house prefect, to report anyone ragging him on the subject, but it's turning the boy into a loner and we all know loners go one of two ways. Either they mope around, until they fall by the wayside, or they set about proving themselves by spectacular acts of brigandage. Briggs seems to have chosen the latter course.'

Barnaby went on to relay Briggs's story of his truancy. He admitted frankly that he had gone to Chilcott's orchard to steal apples but had not, he said, had the chance to pocket any, not even windfalls. He was merely surveying the field of operations from inside Chilcott's hedge, when he heard the approach of a car and had dived for cover behind the gatepost. It had been touch and go after that. Somebody (he couldn't say who because he was crouched behind the gatepost) had opened the padlocked gate and entered the orchard and Briggs, seizing his sole chance of escape, had doubled through the gate but not, he claimed, to regain the road to Stone Cross. A blanket, 'smelling of linseed, sir,' had been thrown over his head, he had been trussed with a coil of rope, 'smelling of creosote, sir,' bundled into the back of a car and driven away at high speed.

He could give no details of the ride – 'I think I must have blacked out, sir…' – but when the car stopped he managed to wriggle free of bonds and escape into the market square. The town turned out to be Norton Dip, some twenty miles north-east of Bamfylde, and it was dark, so he at once set out to walk back to school. 'I didn't catch a local train, sir, although I had the money for the fare. I thought I should get clear of those chaps, so I walked as far as Crosshayes, where I hid near the station until the slow goods came in. I got a lift there in the guard's van as far as Bamfylde Bridge Halt. Walrus Tapscott can back me up about that, sir, for he saw me. I told him I'd been lost on a run. Then… well… I just walked up, sir, and here I am.'

'You don't believe a single word of this rigmarole, do you?' David enquired, but Barnaby said he was obliged to believe part of it, for he had checked with Tapscott at the station, and Briggs had indeed descended from the Crosshayes goods train at about five a.m. that morning. 'He's also got marks on his wrists that could be caused by ropes,' he added. 'Otherwise he's in good shape.'

'Then even if you believe some of it, it's a matter for the police, isn't it?'

'No,' Barnaby said, 'it isn't, but not for obvious reasons, the bad publicity we should get over a thing like this. I believe it's about half the truth, that is to say, I believe he did motor to Norton Dip, and return the way he claims, but don't ask me why, or how much he's hiding, or for what reason. All I can say is Algy's “little man” tells me we should let well alone, P.J.'