Vintage Stuff (6 page)

Inside Glodstone's room he checked the letters in the cigar box, replaced the one at the very
bottom and was no wiser. Why on earth did Glodstone bring these letters out and handle them as if
they were precious? Slymne looked round the room for a clue. The photograph of Rear-Admiral
Glodstone on the quarter deck of H.M.S. Ramillies told him nothing. Nor did a water-colour of a
large square Victorian house which Slymne supposed to be Glodstone's family home. A pipe-rack,
another photograph of Glodstone at the wheel of his Bentley, the usual bric-a-brac of a bachelor
schoolmaster, and shelves filled with books. An amazing number of books. Slymne had had no idea
Glodstone was such an omnivorous reader. He was about to cross to a bookshelf when a sound
outside halted him. Someone was coming up the stairs.

Slymne moved. With understandable swiftness, he was through the door of Glodstone's bedroom
and wedged up against the washbasin behind it when someone entered the study. Slymne held his
breath and was conscious of a horrible weakness. Who the hell could be about when the school was
supposed to be empty? And how in God's name was he to explain his presence hiding in the bedroom?
For a moment he supposed it might be the woman who cleaned Glodstone's room and made his bed. But
the bed was made and whoever was in the study was putting a book back on a shelf. Several minutes
passed, another book was withdrawn, there was silence and the sound of the door opening and
shutting again. Slymne slumped against the wall with relief but stayed there for five more
minutes before venturing out.

On the desk he found a sheet of paper and a message written in neat but boyish script. 'Dear
sir, I've returned Rogue Male. It was just as good as you said. I've borrowed The Prisoner of
Zenda. I hope you don't mind. Clyde-Browne.'

Slymne stared at the message and then let his eyes roam round the room. The books were all
adventure stories. He ran along a shelf containing Henty and Westerman, Anthony Hope, A. E. W.
Mason, all of Buchan. Everywhere he looked there were adventure stories. No wonder the beastly
man had boasted that he only read decent manly stuff. Taking a book from a side table, he opened
it: 'The castle hung in the woods on the spur of a mountainside, and all its walls could be seen,
except that which rose to the North.'

It was enough. Slymne had found the connecting link between Glodstone's treasure of mundane
letters from the Comtesse de Montcon, his Bentley and his belligerent datedness.

As evening came, and with it the sounds of cars and boys' voices, Slymne sat on in the
darkness of his room letting his mind loose on a scheme that would use all Glodstone's adolescent
lust for violent adventure and romance, lure him into a morass of misunderstanding and
indiscretion. It was a delightful prospect.

For the rest of the term, Slymne soaked himself in adventure stories. It was a thoroughly
distasteful task but one that had to be done if his plan was to work. He did his reading secretly
and, to maintain the illusion that his interests lay in an entirely different direction, he
joined the Headmaster's Madrigal Singers, bought records of Tippett and Benjamin Britten and,
ostensibly to hear Ashkenazy playing at the Festival Hall, drove down to London.

'Slimey's trying to worm his way into the Head's good graces by way of so-called music,' was
Glodstone's comment, but Slymne's activities in London had nothing to do with music. Carefully
avoiding more fashionable stationery shops, he found a printer in Paddington who was prepared to
duplicate La Comtesse de Montcon's notepaper and crested envelopes.

'I'll have to see the original if you want it done exactly,' he told Slymne, who had produced
photographs of the crest and printed address. 'And it'll cost.'

'Quite,' said Slymne, uncomfortably supposing that the man took him for a forger or
blackmailer or both. The following week, he found an excuse to be in the Secretary's office when
the mail came, and was able to filch Wanderby's letter from his mother. That Saturday, on the
grounds that he had to visit a London dentist about his gum trouble, Slymne was back at the
printer's with the envelope he had carefully steamed open. He returned to Groxbourne with a lump
of cotton wool stuck uncomfortably in his mouth to suggest some dental treatment. 'I'm afraid
you'll have to do without me. Dentist's orders,' he explained thickly to the Headmaster. 'Not
allowed to sing for the time being.'

'Dear me, well we'll just have to do our best in your absence,' said the Headmaster, with the
later comment to his wife that at least they couldn't do worse.

Next day, Wanderby's lost letter was found, rather muddied, in the flowerbed outside the
Secretary's office and the postman was blamed.

By the end of term, Slymne had completed his preliminary preparations. He had collected the
envelopes and notepaper and had deposited most of them in a locked tin box at his mother's house
in Ramsgate for the time being. He had renewed his passport and taken out travellers' cheques.
While the rest of the staff dispersed for the Easter holidays, Mr Slymne took the cross-Channel
ferry to Boulogne and hired a car. From there he drove to the Belgian frontier before turning
south at a small border crossing near Armentières. The place was carefully chosen. Even Slymne
had memories of old men croaking 'Mademoiselle d' Armentières, parlez-vous?' in remembrance of
their happy days of slaughter in the First World War, and the name would arouse just the right
outdated emotions he required in Glodstone. So must the route. Slymne stopped frequently to
consult his maps and the guidebooks to find some picturesque way through this industrial
grimness, but finally gave up. Anyway, it would heighten the romance of the wooded roads and
valleys further south and the slag-heaps and coal-mines had the advantage of lending the route a
very convincing reality. If one wanted to enter France unobserved, this was the way to come. And
so Slymne kept to side roads, well away from autoroutes and big towns during his daytime driving,
only moving into a hotel in a city at night. All the time he made notes and made sure he was
maintaining the spirit of Glodstone's reading without bringing him too closely in touch with the
real world.

For that reason he avoided Rouen and crossed the Seine by a bridge further south, but indulged
himself on Route 836 down the Eure before back-tracking to Ivry-la-Bataille and noting an hotel
there and its telephone number. After that, another diversion by way of Houdan and Faverolles to
Nogent-Le-Roi and Chartres. He was hesitant about Chartres, but one look at the Cathedral
reassured him. Yes, Chartres would inspire Glodstone. And what about Château Renault just off the
road to Tours? It had been four miles outside Château Renault that Mansel and Chandos had gassed
Brevet in his own car. Slymne decided against it and chose the minor road to Meung-sur-Loire as
being more discreetly surreptitious. He would have to impress on Glodstone the danger of crossing
rivers in big towns. Slymne made a note 'Bridge bound to be watched,' in his notebook and drove
on.

It took him ten days to plan the route and, to be on the safe side, he stayed clear of the
countryside round the Château Carmagnac with one exception. On the tenth night he drove to the
little town of Boosat and posted two letters in separate boxes. To be precise, he posted
envelopes, each with a crest on the back and with his own address typed onto a self-adhesive
label on the front. Then he turned north and retraced his route to Boulogne, checking each mark
he had made on his maps against the comments in his notebook and adding more information.

By the time he sailed for Folkestone, Mr Slymne was proud of his work. There were some
advantages to be had from a degree in geography after all. And the two envelopes were waiting for
him at his mother's house. With the utmost care, he prised off the self-adhesive labels and
steamed open the lightly gummed flaps. Then he set to work with an ink-pad to obliterate the date
on the postmark while leaving Boosat clearly visible. For the next three days, he pored over the
photograph of the Comtesse's letter to Glodstone and traced again and again her large flowing
handwriting. When he returned to Groxbourne, even the Comtesse herself would have found
difficulty in saying which of the letters she had written without reading their contents. Mr
Slymne's skills had come into their own.

It was more than could be said for Peregrine Clyde-Browne. The discrepancy between his school
report and his failure to pass any subject at O-level apart from the maths which, because it
allowed of no alternatives to right and wrong, he had managed to scrape through with a grade C,
had finally convinced Mr Clyde-Browne that sending his son to Groxbourne might have had the
advantage of keeping the brute out of the house for most of the year, but that it certainly
hadn't advanced the chances of getting him into the Army. On the other hand, he had paid the fees
for three years, not to mention his contribution to the Chapel Restoration Fund, and it
infuriated him to think that he had wasted the money.

'We're almost certain to be lumbered with the cretin at the end of the summer term,' he
grumbled, 'and at this rate, he'll never get a job.'

'I think you're being very hard on him. Dr Andrews says he's probably a late developer.'

'And how late is late? He'll be fifty before he knows that Oui is French for Yes and not an
instruction to go to the toilet. And I'll be ninety.'

'And in your second childhood,' retorted Mrs Clyde-Browne.

'Quite,' said her husband. 'In which case you'll have double problems. Peregrine won't be out
of his first. Well, if you want to share your old age with a middle-aged adolescent, I
don't.'

'Since I'm spending my own middle-age with a bad-tempered and callous '

'I am not callous. I may be bad-tempered but I am not callous. I am merely trying to do the
best for your...all right, our son while there's still time.'

'But his reports say '

But Mr Clyde-Browne's patience had run out. 'Reports? Reports? I'd as soon believe a single
word of a Government White Paper as give any credence to those damned reports. They're designed
to con parents of morons to go on shelling out good money. What I want are decent exam
results.'

'In that case you should have taken my advice in the first place and had Peregrine privately
tutored,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne, knitting with some ferocity.

Mr Clyde-Browne wilted into a chair. 'You may be right at that,' he conceded, 'though I can't
imagine any educated man staying the course. Peregrine would have him in a mental home within a
month. Still, it's worth trying. There must be some case-hardened crammer who could programme him
with enough information to get his O-levels. I'll look into it.'

As a result of this desperate determination, Peregrine had spent the Easter holidays with Dr
Klaus Hardboldt, late of the Army Education Corps. The doctor's credentials were of the highest.
He had drilled the Duke of Durham's son into Cambridge against hereditary odds and had had the
remarkable record of teaching eighteen Guards officers to speak pidgin Russian without a
lisp.

'I think I can guarantee your son will pass his O-levels,' he told Mr Clyde-Browne. 'Give me
anyone for three weeks of uninterrupted training and they will learn.'

Mr Clyde-Browne had said he hoped so and had paid handsomely. And Dr Hardboldt had lived up to
his promise. Peregrine had spent three weeks at the Doctor's school in Aldershot with astonishing
results. The Doctor's methods were based on his intimate observations of dogs and a close
connection with several chief examiners.

'Don't imagine I expect you to think, because I don't,' he explained the first morning. 'You
are here to obey. I require the use of only one faculty, that of memory. You will learn off by
heart the answers to the questions which will be set you in the exam. Those of you who fail to
remember the answers will be put on bread and water; those who are word perfect will get fillet
steak. Is that clear?'

The class nodded.

'Pick up the piece of paper in front of you and turn it over.'

The class did as they were told.

'That is the answer to the first question in the Maths paper you will be set. You have twenty
minutes in which to learn it off by heart.'

At the end of twenty minutes, Peregrine could remember the answer. Throughout the day, the
process continued. Even after dinner it resumed and it was midnight before Peregrine got to bed.
He was wakened at six next morning and required to repeat the answers he had learnt the day
before to a tape recorder.

'That is known as reinforcement,' said the Doctor. 'Today we will learn the answers to the
French questions. Reinforcement will be done tomorrow before breakfast.'

Next day, Peregrine went hungrily into the classroom for geography and was rewarded with steak
at dinner. By the end of the week, only one boy in the class was still incapable of remembering
the answers to all the questions in History, Geography, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and English
Literature.

Dr Hardboldt was undismayed. 'Sit, sir,' he ordered when the boy fell off his chair for the
third time, owing to semi-starvation. The lad managed to get into a sitting position. 'Good dog,'
said the Doctor, producing a packet of Chocdrops. 'Now beg.'

As the boy put up his hands, the Doctor dropped a Chocdrop into his mouth. 'Good. Now then
Parkinson, if you can obey that simple instruction, there's not the slightest doubt you can pass
the exam.'

'But I can't read,' whimpered Parkinson, and evidently tried to wag his tail.

Doctor Hardboldt looked at him grimly. 'Can't read? Stuff and nonsense, sir. Any boy whose
parents can afford to pay my fees must be able to read.'

'But I'm dyslexic, sir.'

The Doctor stiffened. 'So,' he said. 'In that case we'll have to apply for you to take your
O-levels orally. Take this note to my secretary.'