Gentlemen and Players

1

Friday, 5th November, 9:15 P.M., Bonfire Night

“Well, then,” he said. “I suppose that’s that.”

The fireworks were over, and the crowd had begun to disperse, shuffling slowly toward the exits. The cordoned area was almost empty; only the smell of gunsmoke remained. “Perhaps we ought to find Marlene. I don’t like to think of her waiting alone.”

Dear old Straitley. Always the gent. And so close too; certainly he’d come closer to the truth than my mother, or my analyst, or any of the professionals who had tried to understand my teenage mind. Not quite close enough—not yet—but he was almost there, we were in the endgame now, and my heart beat a little faster at the thought. Long ago I’d faced him as a pawn and lost. Now, at last, I challenged him as a queen.

I turned to him, smiled, and said, “Valé, magister.”

“What did you say?”

She had turned to go; in the glow of the embers she looked very youthful under her red beret, her eyes pinned with dancing firelight. “You heard,” she said. “You heard me then, didn’t you, sir?”

Then? The invisible finger prodded me gently, almost sympathetically. I felt a sudden urge to sit down and resisted it.

“You’ll remember in time,” said Miss Dare, smiling. “After all, you’re the one who never forgets a face.”

I watched him as he worked it out. The mist had thickened; now it was hard to see beyond the closest trees. At our backs, the bonfire was nothing but embers; unless it rained it would continue to smolder for two or three days. Straitley frowned, burnished like a wrinkled totem in the dim light. A minute passed. Two minutes. I began to feel anxious. Was he too old? Had he forgotten? And what would I do if he failed me now?

Finally, he spoke. “It’s—it’s Julie, isn’t it?”

Close enough, old man. I dared draw breath. “Julia, sir. Julia Snyde.”

Julia Snyde.

Such a long time since I’d heard that name. Such a long time since I’d even thought of her. And yet here she was again, looking just like Dianne Dare, looking at me with affection—and a touch of humor—in her bright brown eyes.

“You changed your name?” I said at last.

She smiled. “Under the circumstances, yes.”

That I could understand. She’d gone to France—“Paris, was it? I suppose that’s where you learned your French.”

“I was an apt pupil.”

Now I recalled that day in the gatehouse. Her dark hair, cut shorter than it is now, the neat, girlish outfit, pleated skirt and pastel sweater. The way she’d smiled at me, shyly then, but with knowledge in her eyes. How I’d been sure she’d known something—

I looked at her now in the uncanny light and wondered how I could have failed to miss her. I wondered what she was doing here now, and how she had changed from Porter’s girl to the assured young woman she was today. Most of all I wondered just how much she had known, and why she had hidden it from me, now and all those years ago.

“You did know Pinchbeck, didn’t you?” I said.

Silently she nodded.

“But then—what about Keane?”

She smiled. “As I said. He had to go.”

Well, serve him right, the little sneak. Him and his notebooks. My first glance should have warned me; those lines, those drawings, those whimsical little observations on the nature and history of St. Oswald’s. I remember asking myself then whether it wouldn’t have been better to deal with him straightaway; but I had a lot on my mind at the time, and anyway, there wasn’t much—besides that photograph—to incriminate me.

You’d think a budding author would have been far too busy with his Muse to go messing with such ancient history. But he had—plus he’d spent time at Sunnybank Park, though he was three or four years ahead of me, and wouldn’t have made the connection straightaway.

I hadn’t myself for a while, you know; but somewhere along the line, I must have recognized his face. I’d known it before I joined Sunnybank Park; remembered watching as a gang of boys cornered him after school; remembered his neat clothes—suspicious for a Sunnybanker—and, most of all, the library books under his arm that proclaimed him a target. I’d known right then it could have been me.

It had taught me a lesson, watching that boy. Be invisible, I’d warned myself. Don’t look too smart. Don’t carry books. And if in doubt, run like hell. Keane hadn’t run. That had always been his problem.

In a way I’m sorry. Still, after the notebook, I knew I couldn’t let him live. He’d already found the St. Oswald’s picture; he’d talked to Marlene, and most of all there was that photograph, taken from God knows what Sports Day at Sunnybank, with Yours Truly at the back (the Thunderpants mercifully out of sight). Once he’d made that connection (and he would have done, sooner or later), it would have been a simple matter of going through Sunnybank’s photo archive until he found what he was looking for.

I’d bought the knife some months before—£24.99 from Army Stores—and I have to say it was a good one; sharp, slim, double-edged, and lethal. Rather like myself, in fact. A pity I had to leave it, really—I’d meant it for Straitley—but retrieving it would have been a messy business, and besides, I didn’t want to be wandering around a public park with a murder weapon in my pocket. No chance of finding any prints on the knife, either. I was wearing gloves.

I’d followed him to the cordoned area, just as the fireworks were starting. Here there were trees, and in their shelter the shadows were doubly dark. There were people all around, of course; but most of them were watching the sky, and in the false light of all those rockets, nobody saw the quick little drama that played out under the trees.

It takes a surprising amount of skill to stab someone between the ribs. It’s the intercostal muscles that are the trickiest part; they contract, you know, so that even if you don’t strike a rib by accident, you have to get through a layer of tensed muscle before you do any real damage. Going for the heart is equally risky; it’s the breastbone, you see, that gets in the way. The ideal method is through the spinal cord, between the third and fourth vertebrae, but you tell me how I was expected to locate the spot, in the dark, and with most of him hidden under a great big Army Surplus parka?

I might have cut his throat, of course, but those of us who have actually tried it, rather than just watching the movies, will tell you that it’s not as easy as it looks. I settled for an upward thrust from the diaphragm, just below the wishbone. I dumped him under the trees, where anyone seeing him would assume he was drunk, and leave him well alone. I’m not a biology teacher, so I can only guess—blood loss or a collapsed lung—as to the technical cause of death, but he was pretty damn surprised about it, I can tell you.

“You killed him?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing personal.”

It occurred to me that perhaps I was genuinely ill; that all this was a kind of hallucination that said more about my subconscious than I wanted to know. Certainly I’d felt better. A sudden stitch dug painfully into my left armpit. The invisible finger had become an entire hand; a firm, constant pressure against my breastbone that made me gasp.

“Mr. Straitley?” There was concern in Miss Dare’s voice.

“Just a stitch,” I said, and sat down abruptly. The muddy ground, though soft, seemed astonishingly cold; a cold that pulsed up through the grass like a dying heartbeat. “You killed him?” I repeated.

“He was a loose end, sir. As I said, he had to go.”

“And Knight?”

There was a pause. “And Knight,” said Miss Dare.

For a moment, an awful moment, my breath caught. I hadn’t liked the boy, but he was one of mine, and in spite of everything I suppose I’d hoped—

“Mr. Straitley, please. I can’t have this now. Come on, stand up.” She put a shoulder under my arm—she was stronger than she looked—and hauled me upright.

“Knight’s dead?” I said numbly.

“Don’t worry, sir. It was quick.” She wedged a hip against my ribs, half hoisting me to my feet. “But I needed a victim, and not just a body, either. I needed a story. A murdered schoolboy makes front-page news—on a slow day—but a missing boy just keeps on giving. Searches; speculation; tearful appeals from the distracted mother; interviews with friends; then as hope dwindles, the dragging of local ponds and reservoirs, the discovery of an item of clothing and the inevitable DNA testing of listed pedophiles in the area. You know how it is, sir. They know, but they don’t know. And until they know for certain—”

The cramp in my side came again, and I gave a smothered gasp. Miss Dare broke off at once. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said in a gentler voice. “None of that’s important now. Knight can wait. It’s not as if he’s going anywhere, is it? Just breathe slowly. Keep walking. And for God’s sake, look at me. We don’t have much time.”

And so I breathed, and I looked, and I kept walking, and slowly we limped, I hanging like an albatross around Miss Dare’s neck, toward the sheltering trees.

2

Bonfire Night, 9:30 P.M.

There was a bench under the trees. We staggered there together across the muddy grass, and I collapsed onto the seat with a jolt that set my old heart twanging like a broken spring.

Miss Dare was trying to tell me something. I tried to explain that I had other things on my mind. Oh, it comes to us all in the end, I know; but I’d expected something more than this madness in a muddy field. But Keane was dead; Knight was dead; Miss Dare was someone else, and now I could no longer pretend to myself that the agony that flared and clawed at my side was anything remotely resembling a stitch. Old age is so undignified, I thought. Not for us the glories of the Senate, but a rushed exit in the back of an ambulance—or worse, a doddering decline. And still I fought it. I could hear my heart straining to keep moving, to keep the old body going for just a little longer, and I thought to myself, Are we ever ready? And do we ever, really believe?

“Please, Mr. Straitley. I need you to concentrate.”

Concentrate, forsooth! “I happen to be rather preoccupied at the moment,” I said. “The small matter of my imminent demise. Maybe later—”

But now that memory came again, closer now, almost close enough to touch. A face, half-blue, half-red, turning toward me, a young face raw with distress and harsh with resolve, a face, glimpsed once, fifteen years ago—

“Shh,” said Miss Dare. “Can you see me now?”

And then, suddenly, I did.

A rare moment of overwhelming clarity. Dominoes in line, rattling furiously toward the mystic center. Black-and-white pictures leaping into sudden relief; a vase becomes lovers; a familiar face disintegrates and becomes something else altogether.

I looked; and in that moment I saw Pinchbeck; his face upturned, his glasses strobing in the emergency lights. And at the same time I saw Julia Snyde with her neat black fringe; and Miss Dare’s brown eyes under her schoolboy’s cap, the red-blue flashes of the fireworks illuminating her face, and suddenly, like that, I just knew.

Do you see me now?

Yes, I do.

I caught the moment. His jaw dropped. His face seemed to slacken; it was like watching rapid decay through time-lapse photography. Suddenly he looked far older than his sixty-five years; in fact in that moment he looked every bit the Centurion.

Catharsis. It’s what my analyst keeps talking about; but I’d never experienced anything like it until then. That look on Straitley’s face. The understanding—the horror—and behind it, I thought perhaps, the pity.

“Julian Pinchbeck. Julia Snyde.”

I smiled then, feeling the years slip from me like deadweight. “It was staring you in the face, sir,” I said. “And all the time you never saw it. Never even guessed.”

He sighed. He looked increasingly ill now; his face was hung with sweat. His breath rattled and churned. I hoped he wasn’t about to die. I’d waited too long for this moment. Oh, he’d have to go in the end, of course—with or without my killing knife I knew I could finish him easily—but before that, I wanted him to understand. To see and to know without any doubt.

“I see,” he said. (I knew he didn’t.) “It was a dreadful business.” (That it was.) “But why take it out on St. Oswald’s? Why blame Pat Bishop, or Grachvogel, or Keane—and why kill Knight, who was just a boy—”

“Knight was bait,” I said. “Sad, but necessary. And as for the others, don’t make me laugh. Bishop? That hypocrite. Running scared at the first breath of scandal. Grachvogel? It would have happened sooner or later whether I had a hand in it or not. Light? You’re better off without him. And as for Devine—I was practically doing you a favor. More interesting is the way in which history repeats itself. Look how fast the Head dropped Bishop when he thought this scandal might damage the school. Now he knows how my father felt. It didn’t matter whether he was to blame or not. It didn’t even matter that a pupil had died. What mattered most—what still matters most—was protecting the school. Boys come and go. Porters come and go. But God forbid that anything should happen to besmirch St. Oswald’s. Ignore it, bury it, and make it go away. That’s the school motto. Isn’t that right?” I took a deep breath. “Not now, though. Now, at last, I’ve got your attention.”

He gave a rasp that could have been laughter. “Perhaps,” he said. “But couldn’t you just have sent us a postcard?”

Dear old Straitley. Always the comedian. “He liked you, sir. He always liked you.”

“Who did? Your father?”

“No, sir. Leon.”

There was a long, dark silence. I could feel his heart pumping. The holiday crowd had long since dispersed, and only a few scattered figures remained, silhouetted against the distant bonfire and in the near-deserted arcades. We were alone—as alone as we could be—and all around us I could hear the sounds of the leafless trees; the slow, brittle creaking of the branches; the occasional sharp tussle of a small animal—rat or mouse—in the fallen leaves.

The silence went on so long that I feared the old man had gone to sleep—that, or had slipped into some distant place to which I could not follow him. Then he sighed and put out his hand toward me in the darkness. Against my palm, his fingers were cold.

“Leon Mitchell,” he said slowly. “Is that what this is all about?”

3

Bonfire Night, 9:35 P.M.

Leon Mitchell. I should have known. I should have known from the start that Leon Mitchell was at the bottom of this. If ever a boy was trouble incarnate, he was the one. Of all my ghosts he has never rested easy. And of all my boys he haunts me most.

I spoke to Pat Bishop about him once, trying to understand exactly what had happened and whether there was something more I might have done. Pat assured me there wasn’t. I was at my balcony at the time. The boys were below me on the Chapel roof. The Porter was already on the scene. Short of flying down there like Superman, what could I have done to prevent the tragedy? It happened so fast. No one could have stopped it. And yet hindsight is a deceitful tool, turning angels into villains, tigers into clowns. Over the years, past certainties melt like ripe cheese; no memory is safe.

Could I have stopped him? You can’t imagine how often I have asked myself that very question. In the small hours it often seems all too possible; events unspooling with dreamlike clarity as time and again the boy falls—fourteen years old, and this time I was there—there at my balcony like an overweight Juliet, and in those small hours I can see Leon Mitchell all too clearly, clinging to the rusty ledge, his broken fingernails wedged into the rotting stone, his eyes alive with terror.

“Pinchbeck?”

My voice startles him. A voice of authority, coming so unexpectedly out of the night. He looks up instinctively—his grip breaks. Maybe he calls out; begins to reach up; his heel stropping against a foothold that is already half rust.

And then it begins, so slow at first and yet so impossibly fast, and there are seconds, whole seconds for him to think of that gullet of space, that terrible darkness.

Guilt, like an avalanche, gathering speed.

Memory, snapshots against a dark screen.

Dominoes in a line—and the growing conviction that perhaps it was me, that if I hadn’t called out just at that precise moment, then maybe—just maybe—

I looked up at Miss Dare and saw her watching me. “Tell me,” I said. “Just whom do you blame?”

Dianne Dare said nothing.

“Tell me.” The stitch-that-wasn’t clawed fiercely into my side; but after all these years the need to know was more painful still. I looked up at her, so smooth and serene; her face in the mist like that of a Renaissance Madonna. “You were there,” I said with an effort. “Was I the reason Leon fell?”

Oh, how clever you are, I thought. My analyst could learn a trick or two. To throw that sentiment back at me—hoping perhaps, to gain a little more time . . .

“Please,” he said. “I need to know.”

“Why’s that?” I said.

“He was one of my boys.”

So simple; so devastating. One of my boys. Suddenly I wished he’d never come; or that I could have disposed of him, as I’d disposed of Keane, easily, without distress. Oh, he was in a bad way; but now it was I who struggled to breathe; I who felt the avalanche poised to roll over me. I wanted to laugh; there were tears in my eyes. After all these years, could it be that Roy Straitley blamed himself? It was exquisite. It was terrible.

“You’ll be telling me next he was like a son to you.” The tremor in my voice belied the sneer. In fact, I was shaken.

“My lost boys,” he said, ignoring the sneer. “Thirty-three years and I still remember every one. Their pictures on my living room wall. Their names in my registers. Hewitt, ”72. Constable, “86. Jamestone, Deakin, Stanley, Poulson—Knight—” He paused. “And Mitchell, of course. How could I have forgotten him? The little shit.”

It happens, you know, from time to time. You can’t like them all—though you try as best you can to treat them the same. But sometimes there’s a boy—like Mitchell, like Knight—whom, try as you may, you can never like.

Expelled from his last school for seducing a teacher; spoilt rotten by his parents; a liar, a user, a manipulator of others. Oh, he was clever—he could even be charming. But I knew what he was, and I told her as much. Poison to the core.

“You’re wrong, sir,” she said. “Leon was my friend. The best friend I ever had. He cared for me—he loved me—and if you hadn’t been there—if you hadn’t yelled out when you did—”

Her voice was fragmenting now, becoming—for the first time I had known her—shrill and uncontrolled. It occurred to me only then that she planned to kill me—absurd, really, as I must have known it from the moment of her confession. I supposed I ought to be afraid—but in spite of that, in spite of the pain in my side, all I could feel was an overriding sense of irritation with the woman, as if a bright student had made an elementary grammatical mistake.

“Grow up,” I told her. “Leon didn’t care about anyone but himself. He liked to exploit people. That’s what he did; setting them off against each other, winding them up like toys. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been his idea to go up on the roof in the first place, just to see what would happen.”

She drew a sharp breath like a cat’s hiss, and I knew I’d over-stepped the mark. Then she laughed, regaining her control as if it had never been lost. “You’re fairly Machiavellian yourself, sir.”

I took that as a compliment, and said so.

“It is, sir. I’ve always respected you. Even now I think of you as an adversary rather than an enemy.”

“Be careful, Miss Dare, you’ll turn my head.”

She laughed again, a brittle sound. “Even then,” she said, her eyes gleaming, “I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to know.” She told me how she’d listened in at my classes, gone through my files, built her store from the discarded grains of St. Oswald’s generous harvests. For a time I drifted as she spoke—the pain in my side receding now—recounting those truant days; books borrowed; uniforms pilfered; rules broken. Like the mice, she’d made her nest in the Bell Tower and on the roof; collecting knowledge; feeding when she could. She had been hungry for knowledge; she had been ravenous. And all unknowing, I had been her magister; singled out from the moment I first spoke to her that day in the Middle Corridor, now singled out again to blame for the death of her friend, the suicide of her father, and the many failures in her life.

It happens, sometimes. It’s happened to most of my colleagues at one time or another. It’s an inevitable consequence of being a schoolmaster, of being in charge of susceptible adolescents. Of course, for female members of staff it happens daily; for the rest of us, thank God, it is only occasional. But boys are boys; and they sometimes fixate upon a member of staff (male or female)—sometimes they even call it love. It’s happened to me; to Kitty; even to old Sourgrape, who once spent six months trying to shake off the attentions of a young student called Michael Smalls, who found every excuse to seek him out, to monopolize his time, and finally (when his wooden-faced hero failed to live up to his impossible expectations) to disparage him on every possible occasion to Mr. and Mrs. Smalls, who eventually removed their son from St. Oswald’s (after a set of disastrous O-level results) to an alternative school, where he settled down and promptly fell in love with the young Spanish mistress.

Now, it seemed, I was in the same boat. I don’t pretend to be Freud or anyone, but it was clear even to me that this unfortunate young woman had somehow chosen me in much the same way that young Smalls had chosen Sourgrape, investing in me qualities—and now, responsibilities—that were quite out of proportion with my true role. Worse, she had done the same with Leon Mitchell, who, being dead, had attained a status and a romance to which no living person, however saintly, might hope to aspire. Between us, there could be no contest. After all, what victory can there ever be in a battle with the dead?

Still, remained that irritation. It was the waste, you see, that troubled me; the confounded waste. Miss Dare was young, bright, talented; there should have been a bright, promising life stretching out ahead of her. Instead she had chosen to shackle herself, like some old Centurion, to the wreck of St. Oswald’s; to the gilded figurehead of Leon Mitchell, of all people, a boy remarkable only by his essential mediocrity and the stupid squandering of his young life.

I tried to say so, but she wasn’t listening. “He would have been somebody,” she said in a stubborn voice. “Leon was special. Different. Clever. He was a free spirit. He didn’t play to the normal rules. People would have remembered him.”

“Remembered him? Perhaps they would. Certainly I’ve never known anyone to leave so many casualties behind him. Poor Marlene. She knew the truth, but he was her son and she loved him, whatever he did. And that teacher at his old school. Metalwork teacher; a married man, a fool. Leon destroyed him, you know. Selfishly; on a whim, when he got bored of his attentions. And what about the man’s wife? She was a teacher too, and in that profession it makes you guilty by association. Two careers down the drain. One man in prison. A marriage ruined. And that girl—what was her name? She can’t have been more than fourteen years old. All of them victims of Leon Mitchell’s little games. And now me, Bishop, Grachvogel, Devine—and you, Miss Dare. What makes you think you’re any different?”

I had stopped for breath, and there was silence. Silence so complete, in fact, that I wondered if she had gone away. Then she spoke in a small, glassy voice.

“What girl?” she said.

4

Bonfire Night, 9:45 P.M.

He’d seen her in the hospital, where I had not dared go. Oh, I’d wanted to; but Leon’s mother had been there at his bedside the whole time, and the risk was unacceptable. But Francesca had come; and the Tynans; and Bishop. And Straitley, of course.

He’d remembered her well. After all, who wouldn’t? Fifteen years old and beautiful in that way that old men find so inexplicably heartbreaking. He’d noticed her, first for her hair and the way it fell across her face in a single swatch of raw silk. Bewildered, perhaps, but more than a little excited by the drama of it all; the real-life tragedy in which she was a player. She’d chosen black, as if for a funeral, but mostly because it suited her, for after all, Leon wasn’t actually going to die. He was fourteen, for pity’s sake. At fourteen, death is something that only happens on TV.

Straitley hadn’t spoken to the girl. Instead he’d gone to the hospital cafeteria to bring Marlene a cup of tea, whilst waiting for Leon’s visitors to leave. He’d seen Francesca on her way out—still fascinated perhaps by that hair as it moved like an animal across her lower back—and it had crossed his mind that the roundness at her stomach looked more pronounced than the usual adolescent tubbiness; in fact with those long, slim legs and narrow shoulders, that weight around her abdomen made her look more than a little—

I breathed deeply, using the method my analyst had taught me. In for five beats; out for ten. The scent of smoke and dank vegetation was very strong; in the mist my breath plumed like dragon fire.

He was lying, of course. Leon would have told me.

I said it aloud. On the bench the old man lay very still, denying nothing.

“It’s a lie, old man.”

The child would be fourteen years old by now, as old as Leon when he died. Boy or girl? Boy, of course. Leon’s age; with Leon’s gray eyes and Francesca’s dappled skin. He wasn’t real, I told myself—and yet that image refused to be dismissed. That boy—that imaginary boy—with a hint of Leon in the cheekbones, a hint of Francesca in the plump upper lip . . . I wondered, had he known? Could he possibly not have known?

Well, what if he had? Francesca didn’t matter to him. She was just a girl, he’d told me so. Just another shag, not the first, not the best. And yet he’d kept this secret from me, from Pinchbeck, his best friend. Why? Was it shame? Fear? I’d thought Leon above those things. Leon, the free spirit. And yet—

“Say it’s a lie and I’ll let you live.”

No word from Straitley; just a sound like that of an old dog turning over in his sleep. Damn him, I thought. Our game was practically over, and here he was trying to introduce some element of doubt. It annoyed me; as if my business with St. Oswald’s were not simply a matter of pure revenge for my broken life, but some altogether messier, less noble affair. “I mean it,” I said. “Or our game ends now.”

The pains in my chest had subsided now, to be replaced by a deep and languorous cold. In the darkness above me I could hear Miss Dare’s rapid breathing. I wondered if she was planning to kill me now, or whether she meant simply to let nature take its course. As it happened I found I wasn’t especially interested either way.

All the same, I wondered dimly why she cared. My assessment of Leon seemed hardly to have slowed her down; but my description of the pregnant girl had stopped her in her tracks. Clearly, I thought, Miss Dare hadn’t known. I considered what this might mean to me.

“It’s a lie,” she repeated. The cool humor in her voice was gone. Now every word crackled with a lethal static. “Leon would have told me.”

I shook my head. “No, he wouldn’t. He was scared. Terrified it would affect his university prospects. Denied everything at first, but his mother got the truth out of him in the end. As for myself—I’d never seen the girl. Never heard of the other family. But I was Leon’s form tutor. I had to be told. Of course both he and the girl were underage. But the Mitchells and the Tynans had always been friendly, and with support from the parents and the church, I suppose they could have managed.”

“You’re making this up.” Her voice was flat. “Leon wouldn’t have cared about any of that. He’d have said it was banal.”

“Yes, he liked that word, didn’t he?” I said. “Pretentious little oik. Liked to think the normal rules didn’t apply to him. Yes, it was banal, and yes, it frightened him. After all, he was only fourteen.”

There was a silence. Above me, Miss Dare stood like a monolith. Then, at length, she spoke.

“Boy or girl?” she said.

So, she believed me. I drew a long breath, and the hand pressing against my heart seemed to give way, just a little. “I don’t know. I lost touch.” Well, of course I did—we all did. “There was some talk of adoption at the time, but Marlene never told me, and I never asked. You, of all people, should understand why.”

Another silence, longer, if anything, than the previous one. Then, softly and despairingly, she began to laugh.

I could see her point. It was tragic. It was ridiculous. “It takes courage sometimes to face up to the truth. To see our heroes—and our villains—as they really are. To see ourselves as others see us. I wonder, Miss Dare, in all that time you say you were invisible, did you ever really see yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

She’d wanted the truth. And I gave it now, still wondering for what stubborn purpose I was putting myself through all this, and for whom. For Marlene? For Bishop? For Knight? Or simply for Roy Straitley, B.A., who had once tutored a boy called Leon Mitchell with no more or less favor or prejudice than to any other of my boys—or so at least I fervently hoped, even with the drag of hindsight and that small, persistent fear that perhaps some part of me had known the boy might fall—had known but had factored it into some dark equation, some half-considered attempt to slow down the other boy, the boy who pushed him.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I told her softly. “That’s the truth. You pushed him, then thought better of it and tried to help. But I was there, and you had to run—”

For that was what I thought I’d seen, as I peered shortsightedly from my aerie in the Bell Tower. Two boys, one facing me, the other with his back turned, and between us the figure of the school Porter, his wavery shadow flicking out across the long rooftop.

He’d called out, and the boys had fled; the one with his back to me plunging ahead of the other so that he came to a stop almost opposite me in the shadow of the Bell Tower. The other was Leon. I recognized him at once, a brief glimpse of his face in the harsh lights before he joined his friend at the edge of the gully.

It should have been an easy jump. A few feet, and they would have reached the main parapet, allowing them a clear run right across the main school roof. An easy jump for the boys, perhaps, though I could see from John Snyde’s lumbering progress that he was far from capable of following them there.

I could—I should—have called out then; but I needed to know who the other boy was. I already knew he was not one of mine. I know my boys, and even in the darkness I was sure I would have recognized him. They were balanced together on the edge of the drop; a long finger of light from the Quad illuminated Leon’s hair in scarlet and blue. The other boy was still in shadow; one hand outstretched, as if to shield his face from the approaching Porter. A low, but nevertheless violent discussion seemed to be under way.

It lasted ten seconds, maybe even less. I could not hear what they said, though I caught the words jump and Porter and a smattering of shrill, unpleasant laughter. I was angry now; angry as I was with the trespassers in my garden, the vandals at my fence. It was not so much the trespass itself, or even that I had been called there in the middle of the night (in fact I’d come of my own accord, on hearing the disturbance). No, my anger ran deeper than that. Boys misbehave; it’s a fact of life. In thirty years I’ve had ample demonstration. But this was one of my boys. And I felt much as I imagine Mr. Meek to have felt, that day in the Bell Tower. Not that I would have shown it, of course—to be a teacher is principally to hide rage when it is truly felt, and to feign it when it is not—all the same, it would have done me good to see the look on the faces of those two boys as I called out their names from out of the dark. But for that, I needed both their names.

I already knew Leon, of course. In the morning, I knew he would identify his friend. But the morning was still hours away; just then it would be as clear to the boys as it was to me that I was helpless to stop them. I could imagine their response to my angry call—the laughter, the jeers as they sprinted away. Later, of course, I would make them pay. But the legend would endure; and the school would remember, not their four weeks’ litter duty or five-day suspension, but the fact that a boy had defied old Quaz on his own turf and—even for a few hours—had got away with it.

And so I waited, squinting to make out the second boy’s features. For a moment I glimpsed them as he stepped back to make the leap; a sudden slice of red-blue light showed me a young face twisted by some harsh emotion; mouth drawn, teeth bared, eyes like slots. It made him unrecognizable; and yet I knew him, I was sure of it. A St. Oswald’s boy. And now he took the jump at a run. The Porter was approaching fast—his broad back partly eclipsing my field of vision as the roof dipped toward the gully—and then in the sudden blur of movement and the shutter-click of lights I’m sure I saw Pinchbeck’s hand connect with Leon’s shoulder—just for a second—before they went over together into the dark.

Well of course, it wasn’t quite like that. Not from where I was standing, anyway, but close enough all the same. Yes, old man, I pushed Leon, and when you called my name I was sure you’d seen me do it.

Perhaps I even wanted someone to see it; someone to acknowledge my presence at last. But I was confused; appalled at my act; uplifted at my daring; incandescent with guilt and rage and terror and love. I would have given anything for it to have happened the way I told you; Butch and Sundance on the Chapel roof; the last stand; the last look of complicity between friends as we made our brave leap to freedom. But it wasn’t like that. It was nothing like that at all.

“Your dad?” said Leon.

“Jump!” I said. “Go on, man, jump!”

Leon was staring at me, face streaked with fire-engine blue. “So that’s it,” he said. “You’re the Porter’s kid.”

“Hurry up,” I hissed. “There isn’t time.”

But Leon had seen the truth at last; the look I so hated was back on his face, and his lips were curling with cruel mirth. “It’s almost worth getting caught for this,” he whispered, “just to see their faces—”

“Stop it, Leon.”

“Or what, Queenie?” He began to laugh. “What are you going to do, eh?”

There was a horrible taste in my mouth; a taste of sour metal, and I realized I had bitten my lip. Blood ran down my chin like drool.

“Please, Leon—”

But Leon was still laughing in that gaspy, affected way; and for a terrible instant I saw through his eyes; saw fat Peggy Johnsen, and Jeffrey Stuarts, and Harold Mann, and Lucy Robbins, and all the freaks and losers from Mr. Bray’s class, and the Sunnybankers with no future beyond the Abbey Road Estate, and the pram-faces and slappers and toerags and proles, and worst of all I saw myself, clearly, and for the first time.

It was then that I pushed him.

I don’t remember this part as clearly. Sometimes I tell myself it was an accident. Sometimes I almost believe it was. Perhaps I expected him to jump; Spider-man does it across twice that distance; I’d done it enough times myself to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t fall. But Leon did.

My hand on his shoulder.

That sound.

God. That sound.

5

Bonfire Night, 9:55 P.M.

So, at last, you’ve heard it all. I’m sorry it had to be here and now. I was quite looking forward to Christmas at St. Oswald’s—not to mention the inspection, of course. But our game is done. The king is alone. All our other pieces have left the board, and we can face each other honestly, for the first and last time.

I believe you liked me. I think you respected me. Now you know me. That’s all I really wanted of you, old man. Respect. Regard. That curious visibility that is the automatic birthright of those living on the other side of the line.

“Sir? Sir?”

He opened his eyes. Good. I was afraid I’d lost him. It might have been more humane to finish him off, but I found I couldn’t do it. He’d seen me. He knew the truth. And if I killed him now, it would not feel like victory.

A draw, then, Magister. I can live with that.

Besides, there was one last thing that troubled me; one question left unanswered before I could declare an end to the game. It occurred to me then that I might not like the answer. All the same, I needed to know.

“Tell me, sir. If you saw me push Leon, why didn’t you say so at the time? Why protect me when you knew what I’d done?”

I knew, of course, what I wanted him to say. And silently, I faced him now, squatting low enough at his side to catch even the smallest of whispers.

“Talk to me, sir. Why didn’t you tell?”

For a time, there was silence, but for his breathing that rattled slow and shallow in his throat. I wondered then if I’d left it too late; if he planned to expire out of sheer spite. Then he spoke, and his voice was faint, but I heard him well. And he said: “St. Oswald’s.”

She’d said no lies. Well, I gave her the truth. As much of it as I could, anyway, though I was never sure afterward how much of it I had spoken aloud.

That’s why I kept the secret for all these years; never told the police what I’d seen on the roof; allowed the business to die with John Snyde. You have to understand; Leon’s death on school premises was terrible enough. The Porter’s suicide made it worse. But to involve a child—to accuse a child—that would have catapulted the sorry affair into tabloid territory forever. St. Oswald’s didn’t deserve that. My colleagues, my boys—the damage to them would have been incalculable.

And besides, what precisely had I witnessed? A face, glimpsed for a split second in treacherous light. A hand on Leon’s shoulder. The figure of a Porter blocking the scene. It wasn’t enough.

And so I’d let the matter lie. It was barely dishonest, I told myself—after all, I hardly trusted my own testimony as it was. But now here was the truth at last, returning like a juggernaut to crush me, my friends—everything I’d hoped to protect—beneath its giant wheels.

“St. Oswald’s.” Her voice was reflective, barely audible across a cavernous distance.

I nodded, pleased she’d understood. After all, how could she not? She knew St. Oswald’s as well as I did; knew its ways and its dark secrets; its comforts and its little conceits. It’s hard to explain a place like St. Oswald’s. Like teaching, you’re either born to it or you’re not. Drawn in, too many find themselves unable to leave—at least until the day the old place decides to spit them out (with or without a small honorarium taken from Common Room Committee funds). I have been so many years in St. Oswald’s that nothing else exists; I have no friends outside the Common Room; no hopes beyond my boys, no life beyond—

“St. Oswald’s,” she repeated. “Of course it was. It’s funny, sir. I thought maybe you’d done it for me.”

“For you?” I said. “Why?”

Something splashed against my hand; a droplet from the nearby trees, or something else, I wasn’t sure. I suddenly felt a surge of pity—surely inappropriate, but I felt it nevertheless.

Could she really have thought that I had kept silent all these years for the sake of some unimagined relationship between us? That might explain a number of things: her pursuit of me; her all-consuming need for approval; her ever more baroque ways of gaining my attention. Oh, she was a monster; but in that moment I felt for her, and I reached out my clumsy old hand toward her in the darkness.

She took it. “Bloody St. Oswald’s. Bloody vampire.”

I knew what she meant. You can give, and give and give—but St. Oswald’s is always hungry, devouring everything—love, lives, loyalty—without ever sating its interminable appetite.

“How can you bear it, sir? What’s in it for you?”

Good point, Miss Dare. The fact is, I have no choice; I am like a mother bird faced with a chick of monstrous proportions and insatiable greed. “The truth is that many of us—the Old Guard, at least—would lie or even die for St. Oswald’s if duty demanded it.” I didn’t add that I felt as if I might actually be dying there and then, but that was because my mouth was dry.

She gave an unexpected chuckle. “You old drama queen. You know, I feel half inclined to give you your wish—to let you die for dear St. Oswald’s and see how much gratitude you get for it.”

“No gratitude,” I said, “but the tax benefits are enormous.” It was a lame quip, as last words go, but in the circumstances it was the best I could do.

“Don’t be an ass, sir. You’re not going to die.”

“I’m turned sixty-five, and can do as I please.”

“What, and miss your Century?”

“ ‘It is the game,’ ” I misquoted from somewhere or other. “ ‘Not he who plays it.’ ”

“That depends what side you’re on.”

I laughed. She was a clever girl, I thought, but I defy anyone to find a woman who really understands cricket. “I need to sleep now,” I told her drowsily. “Up stumps and back to the pavilion. Scis quid dicant—”

“Not yet, sir,” she said. “You can’t sleep now—”

“Watch me,” I said, and closed my eyes.

There was a long silence. Then I heard her voice, receding now like her footsteps as the cold drew in.

“Happy birthday, Magister.”

Those last words sounded very distant, very final in the dark. The Last Veil, I told myself glumly—at any point now I could expect to see the Tunnel of Light Penny Nation’s always talking about, with its celestial cheerleaders urging me on.

To be honest I’ve always thought it sounded a bit ghastly, but now I thought I could actually see the light—a rather eerie greenish glow—and hear the voices of departed friends whispering my name.

“Mr. Straitley?”

Funny, I thought: I’d expected celestial beings to be rather less formal in their address. But I could hear it clearly now, and in the green glow I could see that Miss Dare had gone, and that what I had taken for a fallen branch in the darkness was in fact a huddled figure, lying on the ground not ten feet away.

“Mr. Straitley,” it whispered again, in a voice as rusty—and as human—as my own.

Now I could see an outstretched hand; a crescent of face behind the furred hood of a parka; then a small greenish light, which I recognized at last as the display screen of a mobile phone, illuminating his face. And it was a familiar face; the expression strained but calm as he began, patiently, still holding the phone with what looked like an agonizing effort, to crawl across the grass toward me.

“Keane?” I said.

6

Paris, 5ième arrondissement

Friday, 12th November

I called the ambulance. There’s always one near the park on Bonfire Night in case of accidents, fights, and general misadventure, and all I had to do was phone in (using Knight’s phone for the last time), reporting that an old man had collapsed and leaving instructions that would be at the same time precise enough to allow them to find him and vague enough to give me a chance to get away in comfort.

It didn’t take long. Over the years I have become rather an expert at quick getaways. I got back to my flat by ten; at ten-fifteen I was packed and ready. I left the hire car (keys in the ignition) on the Abbey Road Estate; by ten-thirty I was fairly certain it would have been stolen and torched. I’d already wiped my computer and removed the hard drive, and now I disposed of what was left along the railway tracks on my way to the station. By then I had only a small case of Miss Dare’s clothes to carry; I left them in a charity bin where they would be laundered and sent to the Third World. Finally I dumped the few documents still pertaining to my old identity into a skip and bought myself a night at a cheap motel and a single rail ticket home.

I have to say, I’ve missed Paris. Fifteen years ago, I never would have believed it possible; but now I like it very much. I am free of my mother (such a sad business, two burned to death in an apartment fire); and as a result I am the sole beneficiary of rather a neat little inheritance. I’ve changed my name as my mother did hers, and I’ve been teaching English for the last two years at a comfortably suburban lycée, from which I have recently taken a short sabbatical to complete the research that will, I am assured, lead to my rapid promotion. I do hope so; in fact I happen to know that a little scandal is about to erupt (regarding my immediate superior’s online gambling problem) which may offer me a suitable vacancy. It isn’t St. Oswald’s, of course; but it will do. For now, at least.

As for Straitley, I hope he survives. No other teacher has earned my respect—certainly not the staff at Sunnybank Park, or at the dull Paris lycée that succeeded it. No one else—teacher, parent, analyst—has ever taught me anything worth knowing. Perhaps this is why I let him live. Or perhaps it was to prove to myself that I have finally surpassed my old magister—though in his case survival carries its own double-edged responsibilities, and what his testimony will mean to St. Oswald’s is hard to tell. Certainly, if he wishes to save his colleagues from the present scandal, I see no alternative but to raise the specter of the Snyde affair. There will be unpleasantness. My name will be mentioned.

I have little anxiety on that front, however; my tracks are well hidden, and unlike St. Oswald’s, I will emerge from this once again unseen and undamaged. But the school has weathered scandals before; and although this new development is likely to raise its profile in a most disagreeable way, I imagine it may endure. In a way, perversely, I hope it does. After all, a sizeable part of me belongs there.

Now, sitting in my favorite café (no, I won’t tell you where it is), with my demitasse and croissants on the vinyl tabletop in front of me and the November wind snickering and sobbing along the broad boulevard, I could almost be on holiday. There’s the same sense of promise in the air; of plans to be made. I should be enjoying myself. Another two months of sabbatical to go, a new, exciting little project to begin, and, best of all, strangest of all, I am free.

But I have dragged this revenge of mine behind me for so long that I almost miss the weight of it; the certainty of having something to chase. For the present, it seems, my momentum is spent. It’s a curious feeling and spoils the moment. For the first time in many years, I find myself thinking of Leon. I know that sounds strange—hasn’t he been with me all this time?—but I mean the real Leon, rather than the figure that time and distance have made of him. He’d be nearly thirty now. I remember him saying: Thirty, that’s old. For Christ’s sake, kill me before I get there.

I never could before, but now I can see Leon at thirty; Leon married; getting a paunch; Leon with a job; Leon with a child. And now, after all, I can see how ordinary he looks, eclipsed by time; reduced to a series of old snapshots, colors faded, now-comic images of fashions long dead—my God, they used to wear that gear?—and suddenly and ridiculously I begin to weep. Not for the Leon of my imagination, but for my own self, little Queenie as was, now twenty-eight years old and heading full tilt and forever into who knows what new darkness. Can I bear it? I ask. And will I ever stop?

“Hé, la Reinette. Ça va pas?” That’s André Joubert, the café owner; a man in his sixties, whip thin and dark. He knows me—or thinks he does—and there is concern in his angular face as he sees my expression. I make a shooing gesture—“Tout va bien”—leave a couple of notes on the table, and step out onto the boulevard, where my tears will dry in the gritty wind. Perhaps I will mention this to my analyst at our next appointment. On the other hand, perhaps I will miss the appointment altogether.

My analyst is called Zara and wears chunky knitwear and l’Air du Temps. She knows nothing of me but my fictions and gives me homeopathic tinctures of sepia and iodine to calm my nerves. She is full of sympathy for my troubled childhood and for the tragedies that robbed me, first of my father, then of my mother, stepfather, and baby sister at such an early age. She feels concern for my shyness, my boyishness, and for the fact that I have never been intimate with a man. She blames my father—whom I have presented to her in the garb of Roy Straitley—and urges me to seek closure, catharsis, self-determination.

It occurs to me that perhaps I have.

Across the boulevard, Paris is bright and sharp around the edges, stripped raw by the November wind. It makes me restless; makes me want to see precisely where that wind is blowing; makes me curious as to the color of the light just over the far horizon.

My suburban lycée seems banal next to St. Oswald’s. My little project has been done before; and the prospect of settling down, of accepting the promotion, of fitting into the niche, now seems altogether too easy. After St. Oswald’s I want more. I still want to dare, to strive, to conquer—now even Paris seems too small to contain my ambition.

Where, then? America might be nice; that land of reinvention, where just to be British confers automatic Gentleman status. A country of black-and-white values, America; of interesting contradictions. I feel that there might be considerable rewards to be gained for a talented player such as myself. Yes, I might enjoy America.

Or Italy, where every cathedral reminds me of St. Oswald’s and the light is golden on the dust and the squalor of those fabulous ancient cities. Or Portugal, or Spain—or farther still, to India and Japan—until one day I find myself back in front of St. Oswald’s main gates, like the serpent with its tail in its mouth, whose creeping ambition girdles the earth.

Now that I come to think about it, it seems inevitable. Not this year—maybe not even this decade—but someday I will find myself standing there, looking in at the cricket grounds and the rugby fields and the quads and arches and chimneys and portcullises of St. Oswald’s School for Boys. I find this a curiously comforting thought—like the image of a candle on a window ledge burning just for me—as if the passing of Time, which has been ever more present in my thoughts these past few years, were simply the passing of clouds across those long golden rooftops. No one will know me. Years of reinvention have given me protective colors. Only one person would recognize me, and I do plan to wait until long after Roy Straitley has retired before I show my face—any of my faces—around St. Oswald’s again. A pity, in a way. I might have enjoyed a final game. Still, when I come back to St. Oswald’s I’ll make sure to look for his name on the Honors Board among the Old Centurions. I have a definite feeling it will be there.

7

14th November

I think it’s Sunday, but I’m not quite sure. The pink-haired nurse is here again, tidying up the ward, and I seem to remember Marlene here too, sitting quietly on the chair beside my bed, reading. But today is really the first day that time has run its natural course, and that the tides of unconsciousness, which have ruled my days and nights for the past week, have begun to recede.

Miss Dare, it seems, has vanished without a trace. Her flat has been cleared; her car was found torched; her last pay packet remains untouched. Marlene, who divides her time between the ward and the school office, tells me that the certificates and letters submitted at the time of her application have been revealed to be fake, and that the “real” Dianne Dare, to whom her Cambridge languages degree was offered five years ago, has been working at a small publisher in London for the past three years and has never even heard of St. Oswald’s.

Naturally, her description has been circulated. But appearances can be changed; new identities forged; and my guess is that Miss Dare—or Miss Snyde, if that’s still her name—may be a long time in eluding us.

I fear that on this subject I have not been able to help the police as much as they would have liked. All I know is that she called the ambulance, and that the medics on board administered the on-the-spot care that saved my life. The next day, a young woman claiming to be my daughter delivered a gift-wrapped packet to the ward; inside they found an old-fashioned silver fob watch, nicely engraved.

No one seems to be able to remember the young woman’s face, although it is true that I have no daughter, or any relative fitting that description. In any case, the woman never returned, and the watch is just an ordinary watch, rather old and slightly tarnished, but keeping excellent time in spite of its age and with a face that, if not precisely handsome, is certainly full of character.

It is not the only gift I have received this week. I’ve never seen so many flowers; you’d think I was a corpse already. Still, they mean well. There’s a spiny cactus here from my Brodie Boys with the impudent message: Thinking of you. An African violet from Kitty Teague; yellow chrysanthemums from Pearman; a Bizzy Lizzy from Jimmy; a mixed bouquet from the Common Room; a Jacob’s ladder from the sanctimonious Nations; a spider plant from Monument (perhaps to replace the ones Devine removed from the Classics office); and from Devine himself, a large castor-oil plant that stands at my bedside with a kind of shiny disapproval, as if asking itself why I’m not dead yet.

It was close, so I’ve been told.

As for Keane, his operation lasted several hours and took six pints of donated blood. He came to see me the other day, and though his nurse insisted he remain in his wheelchair, he looked remarkably well for a man who has cheated death. He has been keeping a notebook of his time in hospital, with sketches of the nurses and caustic little observations on life on the ward. There may be a book in it someday, he says. Well, I’m glad it hasn’t stifled his creativity, at least; though I’ve told him that nothing good ever comes of a teacher turned scribbler, and that if he wants a decent career he should stick to what he’s really good at.

Pat Bishop has left the cardiac ward. The pink-haired nurse (whose name is Rosie) professes to be heartily relieved. “Three Ozzies at the same time? It’ll turn my hair gray,” she moans, although I have noticed that her manner has softened considerably toward me (a side effect, I suppose, of Pat’s charm), and that she spends more time with me now than with any of the other patients.

In the light of new evidence, the charges against Pat have been dropped, although he is still under a suspension order signed by the New Head. My other colleagues have a better chance; none of them were officially charged and so may well return in due course. Jimmy has been reinstated—officially for as long as it takes the school to find a replacement, but I suspect that he will continue to be a permanent fixture. Jimmy himself believes that he has me to thank for this second chance, although I have told him several times that I had nothing to do with it. A few words to Dr. Tidy, that’s all; as for the rest, just blame the approaching school inspection, and the fact that without our dim-witted but mostly capable handyman, a great many of St. Oswald’s small but necessary cogs and wheels would have long since seized up completely.

As for my other colleagues, I hear that Isabelle has gone for good. Light too has left (apparently to begin a business management course, having found teaching too demanding). Pearman is back, to the secret disappointment of Eric Scoones, who saw himself running the department in Pearman’s absence, and Kitty Teague has applied for a Head of Year’s job at St. Henry’s, which I have no doubt she will get. Further afield, Bob Strange is running things on a semipermanent basis—though the grapevine tells me he has had to bear with a significant amount of indiscipline from the boys—and there are rumors of a redundancy package being put together (a generous sum) to ensure that Pat stays away.

Marlene thinks Pat should fight—the Union would certainly back his case—but a scandal is a scandal, regardless of its outcome, and there will always be people who voice the usual clichés. Poor Pat. I suppose he could still get a Headship somewhere—or better still, a post of Chief Examiner—but his heart belongs to St. Oswald’s, and his heart has been broken. Not by the police investigation—they were just doing their job, after all—but by a thousand cuts; the phone calls left unreturned, the embarrassed chance meetings; the friends who changed sides when they saw the way the wind was blowing.

“I could go back,” he told me as he prepared to leave. “But it wouldn’t be the same.” I know what he means. The magic circle, once broken, can never quite be restored. “Besides,” he went on, “I wouldn’t do that to St. Oswald’s.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Marlene, who was waiting. “After all, where was St. Oswald’s when you needed help?”

Pat just shrugged. There’s no explaining it, not to a woman; not even one in a million, like Marlene. I hope she’ll take care of Pat, I thought; I hope she’ll understand that some things can never be fully understood.

Knight?

Colin Knight remains missing, now presumed dead by everyone but the boy’s parents. Mr. Knight is planning to sue the school and has already thrown himself into a number of muscular, well-publicized campaigns—calling for a “Colin’s Law” to be passed, including compulsory DNA testing, psychological evaluation, and stringent police checks on anyone planning to work with children—to ensure, he says, that whatever happened to his boy can never happen again. Mrs. Knight has lost weight and gained jewelry; her pictures in the newspaper and on the daily TV bulletins show a brittle, lacquered woman whose neck and hands seem barely capable of supporting the many chains, rings, and bracelets that hang from her like Christmas baubles. For myself, I doubt her son’s body will ever be found. Ponds and reservoirs have yielded no trace; appeals to the public have raised a great deal of well-meaning response, many hopeful sightings, much goodwill—but no result. There is still hope, says Mrs. Knight on the TV news, but the reason the television is still running the story is not for the boy (whom everyone has written off) but for the riveting spectacle of Mrs. Knight, rigid in Chanel and armored in diamonds, still clinging to that delusion of hope as she stiffens and dies. Better than Big Brother; better than The Osbournes. I never liked her in the old days—I have no reason to like her now—but I do pity her. Marlene had her job to sustain her as well as her affection for Pat; more importantly, Marlene had her daughter, Charlotte—no substitute for Leon, but all the same a child, a hope, a promise. Mrs. Knight has nothing—nothing but a memory that grows ever less reliable as the days pass. Already the tale of Colin Knight has grown in the telling. Like all such victims, he has become a popular boy in retrospect, loved by his teachers, missed by his friends. An outstanding student who could have gone far. The photo in the paper shows him at a birthday party, aged eleven or maybe twelve; smiling brashly (I don’t think I ever saw Knight smile); hair washed; eyes clear; skin as yet unblemished. I barely recognize him, and yet the reality of the boy no longer matters; this is the Knight we will all remember; that tragic image of little-boy-lost.

I wonder what Marlene thinks of it all. After all, she too has lost a son. I asked her today, in passing, as Pat was collecting his things (plants, books, cards, a barrage of Get Well balloons). And I asked her too a question that has remained unasked for so long that it took another murder to give it voice at last.

“Marlene,” I said. “What happened to the baby?”

She was standing by the bed with her reading glasses on, scrutinizing the label on a potted palm. I meant Leon’s child, of course—Leon and Francesca’s—and she must have known it, because her face became abruptly still, taking on a careful lack of expression that reminded me briefly of Mrs. Knight.

“This plant’s very dry,” she said. “It needs watering. God knows, Roy, you’ll never manage to look after them all.”

I looked at her. “Marlene,” I said.

It would have been her grandchild, after all. Leon’s child; the hopeful shoot; the living proof that he had lived, that life goes on, that spring comes round—all clichés, I know, but such are the small wheels upon which the big wheels turn, and where would we be without them?

“Marlene,” I repeated.

Her eyes went to Bishop, who was talking to Rosie some distance away. Then, slowly, she nodded. “I wanted to take him,” she said at last. “He was Leon’s son, and of course I wanted him. But I was divorced; too old to adopt; I had a daughter who needed me and a job that took time. Grandmother or not, they’d never let me take him. And I knew too that if I saw him—even once—I’d never be able to let him go.”

They had put the baby up for adoption. Marlene had never tried to find out where he’d gone. It could have been anywhere. No names, no addresses are exchanged. He could be anyone. We might even have seen him without knowing it, at an interschool cricket match, on a train, or just passing in the street. He could be dead—it happens, you know—or he could be right here, right now, a fourteen-year-old boy among a thousand others, a young half-familiar face, a flop of hair, a look—

“It can’t have been easy.”

“I managed,” she said.

“And now?”

A pause. Pat was ready to go. Now he approached my bedside, unfamiliar in jeans and T-shirt (St. Oswald’s Masters wear a suit), and smiled.

“We’ll manage,” said Marlene, and took Pat’s hand. It was the first time I’d seen her do that; and it was then that I understood I’d never see either of them at St. Oswald’s again.

“Good luck,” I said, meaning good-bye.

For a moment they stood at the foot of my bed, hand in hand, looking down at me. “Take care, old man,” said Pat. “I’ll see you around. God, I can hardly even see you now behind all those bloody flowers.”

8

Monday, 6th December

Apparently I’m not wanted. Or so Bob Strange told me when I turned up at work this morning. “For God’s sake, Roy. It won’t kill the boys to miss a few Latin lessons!”

Well, maybe not; but I happen to care about my boys’ results, I happen to care about the future of Classics in school, and besides, I feel a lot better.

Oh, the doctor said what doctors usually say; but I remember Bevans when he was just a little round boy in my Latin class, with a habit of perpetually removing one shoe during lessons, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him order me about.

I found they’d put Meek in charge of my form. I could tell that from the noise that drifted down through the floor of the Quiet Room; an oddly nostalgic accumulation of sounds, among which Anderton-Pullitt’s persistent treble and Brasenose’s resonant boom were immediately recognizable. There was laughter too, drifting down the stairwell, and for a moment it could have been any time—any time at all—with the sound of boys laughing, and Meek protesting, and the smell of chalk and burnt toast coming up from the Middle Corridor, and the distant blam of bells and doors and footsteps and the peculiar slithering, sliding sound of satchels being dragged along the polished floor, and the heels of my colleagues tap-tapping their way to some office, some meeting, and the dusty golden air of the Bell Tower shining thick with motes.

I took a deep breath.

Ahhh.

It feels as if I have been away for years, but already I can feel the events of the past weeks dropping away, like some dream that happened to someone else a long, long time ago. Here at St. Oswald’s there are still battles to be fought; lessons to be taught; boys to be instructed on the subtleties of Horace and the perils of the ablative absolute. A Sisyphean task: but one with which, as long as I am still standing, I mean to continue. Mug of tea in one hand, copy of the Times (open at the crossword page) tucked neatly under one arm, gown flapping dustily against the polished floor, I make my way resolutely toward the Bell Tower.

“Ah. Straitley.” That’ll be Devine. There’s no mistaking that dry, disapproving voice, or the fact that he never calls me by my first name.

There he was, standing by the stairs; gray suit, pressed gown, and blue silk tie. Starchy doesn’t begin to describe his stiffness; his face wooden as a tobacconist’s Indian in the morning sun. Of course, after the Dare business he is in my debt, and that, I suppose, makes it worse.

Behind him, two men, suited and shod for administrative action, stood like sentinels. Of course. The inspectors. I’d forgotten, in all the excitement, that they were due today, although I had noticed an unusual degree of reserve and decorum amongst the boys as they arrived, and there were three disabled parking spaces in the visitors’ car park that I was sure hadn’t been there the previous night.

“Ah. The Inquisition.” I sketched a vague salute.

Old Sourgrape gave me one of his looks. “This is Mr. Bramley,” he said, gesturing deferentially toward one of the visitors, “and this is his colleague, Mr. Flawn. They’ll be following your lessons this morning.”

“I see,” I said. Trust Devine to arrange that on my first day back. Still, a man who will stoop to the Health and Safety Maneuver will stop at nothing, and besides, I’ve been at St. Oswald’s for too long to be intimidated by a couple of Suits with clipboards. I gave them my heartiest smile and riposted at once. “Well, I’m just on my way to the Classics office,” I said. “It’s so important to have a space of one’s own, don’t you think? Oh, don’t mind him,” I told the inspectors as Devine set off down the Middle Corridor like a clockwork gazelle. “He’s a bit excitable.”

Five minutes later we reached the office. A nice little space, I have to say; I’ve always liked it, and now that Devine’s lot have had it repainted, it looks even more welcoming. My spider plants are back from whatever cupboard Devine had consigned them, and my books pleasingly arranged on a series of shelves behind my desk. Best of all, the printed sign saying GERMAN OFFICE has been replaced by a neat little plaque which reads simply: CLASSICS.

Well, you know, some days you win, some days you lose. And it was with a certain sense of victory that I sailed into room fifty-nine this morning, causing Meek’s jaw to drop and a sudden silence to fall over the Bell Tower.

It lasted a few seconds; and then a sound began to rise from the floorboards, a rumbling sound like a rocket about to take off; and then they were on their feet, all of them; clapping and cheering and yelling and laughing. Pink and Niu; Allen-Jones and McNair; Sutcliff and Brasenose and Jackson and Anderton-Pullitt and Adam-czyck and Tayler and Sykes. All my boys—well, not quite all—and as they stood there, laughing and clapping and yelling my name, I saw Meek stand too, his bearded face lighting up in a genuine smile.

“It’s Quaz!”

“It’s alive!”

“You’re back, sir!”

“Does that mean we still don’t get a proper teacher this term?”

I looked at my fob watch. Snapped it shut. On the lid, the school motto: Audere, agere, auferre.

To dare, to strive, to conquer.

Of course I have no way of knowing for sure if it was Miss Dare who sent it to me, but I am sure it was. I wonder where she is—who she is—now. In any case, something tells me that we may not have heard the last of her. The thought does not trouble me as once it might. We have met challenges before and overcome them. Wars; deaths; scandals. Boys and staff may come and go; but St. Oswald’s stands forever. Our little slice of eternity.

Is that why she did it? I can almost believe it was. She has cut a place for herself in the heart of St. Oswald’s; in three months she has become a legend. What now? Will she return to invisibility—a small life, a simple job, perhaps even a family? Is that what monsters do when the heroes grow old?

For a second I let the noise increase. The din was tremendous; as if not thirty but three hundred boys were running riot in the little room. The Bell Tower shook; Meek looked concerned; even the pigeons on the balcony flew off in a clap of feathers. It was a moment that will stay with me for a long time. The winter sunlight slanting through the windows; the tumbled chairs, the scarred desks, the schoolbags strewn across the faded floorboards; the smell of chalk and dust, wood and leather, mice and men. And the boys, of course. Floppy-haired boys, wild-eyed and grinning, shiny foreheads gleaming in the sun; exuberant leapers; inky-fingered reprobates; foot stampers and cap flingers and belly roarers with shirts untucked and subversive socks at the ready.

There are times when a percussive whisper does the trick. At other times, however, on the rare occasion that a statement really needs to be made, one may sometimes resort to a shout.

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

Nothing. Not a peep.

Out in the corridor the lesson bell rang, a distant buzz that I sensed rather than heard beneath the classroom roar. For a moment I was sure that this was the end; that I had lost my touch as well as my voice; that the boys, instead of jumping to attention, would simply rise up and stampede at the sound of the bell, leaving me like poor Meek, feeble and protesting in their anarchic wake. For a moment I almost believed it as I stood at the door with my tea mug in my hand and the boys like jack-in-the-boxes jumping with glee.

Then I took two steps onto my quarterdeck, laid both hands on the desktop, and tested my lungs.

“Gentlemen. Silence!”

Just as I thought.

Sound as ever.