Vintage Stuff (7 page)

As Parkinson wobbled from the room, the Doctor turned back to the class. 'Is there any other
do...boy here who can't read? I don't want any shilly-shallying. If you can't read, say so, and
we'll have you attended to by the hypnotist.'

But no one in the class needed the attentions of the hypnotist.

The second week was spent writing down verbatim the answers to the questions and in further
reinforcement. Peregrine was woken every so often during the night and interrogated. 'What is the
answer to question four in the History paper?' said the doctor.

Peregrine peered bleary-eyed into the ferocious moustache. 'Gladstone's policy of Home Rule
for Ireland was prevented from becoming law because Chamberlain, formerly the radical Mayor of
Birmingham, split the Liberal party and...'

'Good dog,' said the doctor when he had finished and rewarded him with a Chocdrop.

But it was in the third week that reinforcement became most rigorous. 'A tired mind is a
receptive mind,' the doctor announced on Sunday evening. 'From now on, you will be limited to
four hours sleep in every twenty-four, one hour in every six being allocated for rest. Before you
go to sleep, you will write down the answers to one exam paper and, on being woken, will write
them down again before going on to the next subject. In this way, you will be unable to fail your
O-levels even if you want to.'

After seven more days of conditioning, Peregrine returned to his parents exhausted and with
his brain so stuffed with exam answers that his parents had their own sleep interrupted by an
occasional bark and the sound of Peregrine automatically reciting the doctor's orders. They were
further disturbed by Dr Hardboldt's insistence that Peregrine be prevented from returning to
Groxbourne until after he had sat his exams. 'It is absolutely essential that he isn't exposed to
the confusion of other methods of teaching,' he said. 'Nothing is more damaging to an animal's
learning ability than contradictory stimuli.'

'But Peregrine isn't an animal,' protested Mrs Clyde-Browne. 'He's a delicate, sensitive '

'Animal,' said her husband, whose views on his son coincided entirely with the Doctor's.

'Exactly,' said Dr Hardboldt. 'Now where most teachers go wrong is in failing to apply the
methods used in animal training to their pupils. If a seal can be taught to balance a ball on its
nose, a boy can be taught to pass exams.'

'But the questions are surely different every year,' said Mr Clyde-Browne.

Dr Hardboldt shook his head. 'They can't be. If they were, no one could possibly teach the
answers. Those are the rules of the game.'

'I hope you're right,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne.

'Madam, I am,' said the Doctor. 'Time will prove it.'

And time, as far as Peregrine was concerned, did. He returned to Groxbourne a month late and,
with the air of a sleepwalker, took his O-level exams with every sign that this time he would
succeed. Even the Headmaster, glancing through the papers before sending them off to the external
examiners, was impressed. 'If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it
possible,' he muttered, and immediately wrote to the Clyde-Brownes to assure them that they could
go ahead with their plans to enter Peregrine for the Army.

Mr Clyde-Browne read the letter with delight. 'He's done it. By golly, he's done it,' he
whooped.

'Of course he has,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne, 'I always knew he was gifted.'

Mr Clyde-Browne stopped whooping. 'Not him...'he began and decided to say no more.

But Peregrine's future was being decided by more subtle influences than those of the military
Doctor. Mr Glodstone had spent the holidays in search, as he put it, 'of some damned woman' to
marry. The dung is one doesn't want to marry beneath one,' he confided to Major Fetherington over
several nightcaps of whisky in his rooms.

'Absolutely,' said the Major, whose wife had died of boredom ten years before. 'Still, if
there's lead in your pencil, you've got to make your mark somewhere.'

Glodstone glanced at him dubiously. The Major's metaphor was too coarse for his romantic
imagination. 'Perhaps, but love's got to be there too. I mean, only a cad would marry a girl he
didn't love, don't you think?'

'Suppose so,' said the Major, enjoying the whisky too much to argue from his own experience.
'Still, a fellow's got to think of the future. Knew a chap once, must have been eighty if he was
a day, keen tennis-player in his time, married a woman he happened to be sitting next to in the
Centre Court at Wimbledon. Splendid match. Died in her arms a fortnight later desperately in
love. Never can tell till you try.'

Glodstone considered the moral of this example and found it hardly illuminating. 'That sort of
thing doesn't happen to me,' he said and put the cap back on the whisky bottle.

The trouble with you,' said the Major, 'is that you've got champagne tastes and a beer income.
My advice is to lower your sights. Still, you never know. Chance has a funny way of arranging
things.'

For once Mr Slymne would have shared Glodstone's unspoken disagreement. He was leaving as
little as possible to chance. Having discovered Glodstone's wildly romantic streak, he was
determined to exploit it, but there were still problems to cope with. The first concerned Sports
Day. La Comtesse de Montcon might put in an appearance, and if the wretched woman turned out to
be as formidable as the conversation he had overheard in the house-room suggested, all his
preparations would be wasted. Glodstone would hardly go to the aid of a woman who was manifestly
capable of looking after herself. No, it was vital that the image in Glodstone's imagination
should be that of a poor, defenceless, or to be exact, a rich defenceless sylph-like creature
with an innocence beyond belief. Slymne had a shrewd idea that La Comtesse was more robust. Any
mother who could send her son to Groxbourne had to be. Slymne checked his dossier and found that
Tambon had said 'The countess is a real old cow,' and was reassured. He also surreptitiously took
a look at the Visiting Parents' Book in the Bursar's office and found no evidence that La
Comtesse had ever visited the school.

But to be on the safe side, he used a geography lesson to ask all those boys whose mothers
were coming to Sports Day to put up their hands. Wanderby didn't. Having dealt with that problem,
Slymne concentrated on the next one; how to phrase his letter to Glodstone. In the end he decided
on the direct approach. It would appeal to Glodstone's gallantry more effectively than anything
too subtle. On the other hand; there had to be more definite instructions as well. Slymne penned
the letter, tracing La Comtesse's handwriting again and again for practice, and then on a weekend
visit to London, spent the night in a hotel room making a number of direct-dialled calls to
France. By the time he returned to Groxbourne, he was ready to provide the instructions. Only one
uncertainty remained. Glodstone might have made arrangements for his summer holidays already. In
which case, the timing of the letter would be vital. And Wanderby's own movements in the holidays
might prove awkward too. Again Slymne made use of a geography lesson to find out where the boy
was spending the summer.

'I'm going to Washington to stay with my father and his girl friend,' Wanderby announced
brashly. Mr Slymne was delighted and used the statement in the Common Room that evening to good
advantage.

'I must say we have some pretty peculiar parents,' he said loudly, 'I was discussing time
zones with 2B this morning and that American boy, Wanderbury, suddenly said his father's got a
mistress in Washington.'

Glodstone stopped sucking his pipe. 'Can't you even remember the names of the boys you teach?'
he asked angrily. 'It's Wanderby. And what's all this about his father having a mistress?'

Slymne appeared to notice Glodstone for the first time. 'In your house, isn't he? Typical
product of a broken home. Anyway, I'm merely repeating what he said.'

'Do you make a habit of poking your nose into the boy's family affairs in your lessons?'

'Certainly not. As I said, I was discussing time zones and jet-lag and Wandleby '

'Wanderby, for God's sake,' snapped Glodstone.

' volunteered the information that he was going to Washington at the end of term and that his
father '

'All right, we heard you the first time,' said Glodstone and finished his coffee hurriedly and
left the room. Later that evening as he crossed the quad, Slymne was pleased to notice Glodstone
sitting at his desk by the window with a cigar box beside him. The crack about the broken home
and Wanderby's father having a mistress would enhance Glodstone's romantic image of La Comtesse.
That night, Slymne completed the task of writing out her instructions and locked the letter away
in his filing cabinet.

It was to remain there for another five weeks. The summer term dragged on. Sports Day came and
went, cricket matches were won or lost and Glodstone's melancholy grew darker with the fine
weather and the liveliness of youth around him. He took to polishing the Bentley more frequently
and it was there in the old coach-house one evening that he asked Peregrine what he was going to
do when he left.

'Father's got me down for the Army. But now I've got O-levels, he's talking about my going
into a bank in the City.'

'Not your sort of life I would have thought. Dashed dull.'

'Well, it's on account of my maths,' said Peregrine. 'That and Mother. She's all against my
going into the Army. Anyway, I've got a month free first because I'm going on the Major's course
in Wales. It's jolly good fun doing those night marches and sleeping out in the open.'

Glodstone sighed at the remembrance of his youth and came to sudden decision. 'Damn the Head,'
he muttered, 'let's take the old girl out for a spin. After all, it is your last term and you've
done more than your fair whack in keeping her shipshape and Bristol fashion. You go off down to
the school gates and I'll pick you u there in ten minutes.'

And so for an hour they bowled along country lanes with the wind in their faces and the great
exhaust murmuring gently behind them.

'You drive jolly well,' said Peregrine, as they swung round corner and headed through an
overhang of oaks, 'and she goes like a dream.'

Beside him, Glodstone smiled. 'This is the life, eh. Can't beat vintage Bentley. She's a
warhorse just raring to go.'

They came to a village and on the same impulse that had carried him so far, Glodstone stopped
outside a pub. 'Two pints of you best bitter, landlord,' said Glodstone loudly, provoking the man
into enquiring if Peregrine was eighteen.

'No...' said Peregrine but his answer was drowned by the boom of Glodstone's voice.

'Of course he is. Damnation, man, you don't imagine I'd bring an under-age drinker into your
place?'

'I've known it happen,' said the barman, 'so I'll make it on bitter and a lemonade shandy and
you can take your glass outside to a table.'

'We can do better than that and take our custom elsewhere said Glodstone and stalked out of
the pub. 'That's the trouble wit the damned world today, people don't know their place any more
In my father's day, that fellow would have lost his licence and no mistake. Anyway, with a manner
like that, the beer was probably flat.'

They drove on to the next village and stopped again. This time Glodstone lowered his voice and
they were served. As they sat on bench outside admiring their reflections in the shining waxed
coachwork of the great car and basking in the comments it caused Glodstone cheered up.

'You can say what you like but there's nothing to touch a pint of the best British bitter,' he
said.

'Yes,' said Peregrine, who had hardly touched his beer and didn't much like it anyway.

'That's something you won't find in any other country. The Hun swills lager by the gallon and
the Dutch have their own brew which isn't bad but it's got no body to it. Same with the Belgians,
but it's all bottled beer. Mind you, it's better than the Frog muck. Charge the earth for the
stuff too but that's the French all over. Dashed odd, when you come to think of it, that the
wine-drinking countries have never been a match for the beer ones when it comes to a good scrap.
Probably something in the saying they've got no guts and no stomach for a fight.'

Peregrine drank some more beer to mark his allegiance while Glodstone spouted his prejudices
and the world shrank until there was only one decent place to be, and that was sitting in the
summer twilight in an English village drinking English beer and gazing at one's reflection in the
coachwork of an English car that had been made in 1927. But as they drove back to the school,
Glodstone's melancholy returned. 'I'm going to miss you,' he said. 'You're my sort of chap.
Dependable. So if there's anything I can ever do for you, you've only to ask.'

'That's jolly good of you, sir,' said Peregrine.

'And another thing. We can forget the "sir" bit from now on. I mean, it's the end of term and
all that. All the same, I think you'd better hop out when we get to the school gates. No need to
give the Head any reason to complain, eh?'

So Peregrine walked back up the avenue of beeches to the school while Glodstone parked the
Bentley and morosely considered his future. 'You and I are out of place here, old girl,' he
murmured, patting the Bentley's headlight affectionately, 'we were born in a different
world.'

He went up to his room and poured himself a whisky and sat in the darkening twilight wondering
what the devil he was going to do with himself during the holidays. If only he'd been younger,
he'd be inclined to join Major Fetherington's walkabout in Wales. But no, he'd look damned silly
now and anyway the Major didn't like anyone poaching on his own private ground. It was a fairly
desperate Glodstone who finally took himself off to bed and spent half an hour reading The
Thirty-Nine Steps again. 'Why the hell can't something challenging come my way for once?' he
thought as he switched out the light.